The Parthenon

By Julie Fitsch-Mouras:

On Tuesday we visited the Parthenon. I didn’t realize how concentrated everything was, it was like the remains of the middle of the city, with some of the first theaters. The Parthenon was at the top of a hill with human-made cliffs, it was a wall, preventing anyone from entering any other way then by the main entrance, with a small temple and high columns. After entering, we had to walk up a little further to get to the Parthenon. The view was gorgeous; the sea, the city with its houses, and a blue sky with not even a dusty cloud. Across the Parthenon were other ruins, caryatids, statues of women, we acting like columns to hold up a smaller building. The caryatids were only replicas, there were six of them, but we saw the real ones in the Acropolis museum, and only five were actually found. We also found some sort of fossil but weren’t exactly sure what it was, perhaps a snail…

The Parthenon itself was just like I imagined. We weren’t allowed to walk inside, just around. The proportion of the columns was four by eight, apparently it is a standard, and other temples around Greece are in the same format. The building was made of rock, and the columns were made up of smaller cylinders aligned and stacked on top of each other. Some of the cylinders had shifted and looked like they were about to collapse. I wish I could have also seen this at night, with the specific lighting. Overall everyone seemed to be really excited about it, it’s crazy to think people were building this thousands of years ago.