Experts plan to treat the ravages of rust, fumes and war
Sing, Goddess, of Architect Manolis Korres, 35, and the Committee for the Preservation of the Acropolis Monuments, scientists from many nations gathered in Athens, casting off fear as before a great battle, to plan restoration of the most beautiful wonder of the ancient world: the marble Parthenon. That hilltop temple of Zeus' daughter, Athena the Virgin (Athena Parthenos), has for 2,400 years brought glory to Phidias, sculptor of its fluted columns, and to farseeing Pericles, and to all the Hellenes.
Who of these men could know, in 438 B.C., that heavy-shielded Romans would arrive in 86 B.C. and, centuries after, set fire raging in the temple's interior, consuming the gold-and-ivory statue of fair Athena, a masterwork of Phidias now lost to the ages; or that in the 15th century, conquering Turks from across the wine-dark sea would build a domed mosque atop the Parthenon?
Who in Pericles' day could have imagined that the Parthenon would explode in 1687, destroying 14 of its exterior columns, when Turkish gunpowder stored inside it was hit by true-eyed artillery men of the Venetian Republic, firing near by from the Hill of the Muses? Or that in the 19th century, the seventh Earl of Elgin would carry down from the hill pediment statues and one maidenly caryatid, all doomed to sail in ships made of wood to a foreign place not loved by thundering Zeus, the British Museum?
Do you weep, Goddess? Mankind weeps with you.
In the past 100 years, the temple's scourges have been more prosaic, though equally serious. From the 1890s to the 1930s, well-meaning architects sought to strengthen the battered Parthenon, which originally consisted of some 12,500 white marble stones hewn from Mount Pentelicus, ten miles to the north. The restorers added new iron clamps and rods to hold the marble stones in position. But in doing so, they ignored the wisdom of the Parthenon's original designers, the sculptor Phidias and Architects Ictinus and Callicrates. During the installation of the temple's original iron reinforcing rods, the ancient builders used a form of rust-proofing that has been effective for two millenniums: they wrapped the rods tightly in a sheath of pliable lead, which gave them room to expand and contract, and kept away rust-producing moisture. Unfortunately, later restorers did not seal their irons. So the new rods installed near the turn of this century have already rusted. Worse, as the bare iron expands and contracts with changes in temperature, it cracks the old stones.
More recently, the Parthenon has suffered from an eye-stinging yellow smog that envelops Athens for most of the year. Called the nefos (literally, cloud), it is composed mainly of sulfur dioxide, a waste product given off when petroleum is burned in autos, factories and residential furnaces. As rain and dew mix with the SO2, they form a weak sulfuric acid that turns marble into crumbling plaster.