Do we know how the Athenian akropolis looked before the explosion of the Ottoman gunpowder storage during the Venetian siege 1687?

by vonadler

What was the state of the temples? Did they have roofs?

XenophonTheAthenian

Do you mean how did the acropolis look in antiquity, or what state it was in just before the explosion? Because of course we have numerous descriptions of it from ancient authors that give us a pretty good idea of its appearance. If you mean right before the explosion (which I presume you do, since you ask about their state and the roofs), yes we have a fairly good idea. The temple complex was largely ignored in the Middle Ages, and Athens sort of dropped off the face of the map for a little while--some western scholars actually questioned whether any such city as the one mentioned in our ancient texts had ever existed! Most depictions and descriptions of the city from the Middle Ages are just copied-and-pasted descriptions of what the New Pauly calls the "visual topoi of Gothic style without any specific details of the place and are not based on any close and rigorous examination." However, starting with the merchant Cyriacus of Ancona in 1436 and 1447 we start to see clearly eyewitness accounts of the city--Cyriacus copied several inscriptions and made a few (really crappy and inaccurate) sketches of the Parthenon, which appears to still have been in decent shape--his are also the only true depictions of the temple complex prior to the Turkish invasion. Numerous travelers visited in the 17th Century and reported on the acropolis, and made sketches or described it. One of the early ones was a man named Babin in 1676, which is not a particularly helpful sketch. The artist Jacques Carrey in 1674 and an engineer named Plantier early in 1687 both visited and made sketches of the Parthenon. Jacques Carrey's are most important--of his fifty-something sketches, several show pediments and friezes that have been destroyed or significantly damaged since. His only surviving oil on canvass painting of the Parthenon is this picture--of interest is the structure behind the Parthenon, which I believe is the minaret that the Ottomans had recently installed, after converting the Parthenon to a mosque. It's in fairly good shape, as you can see, although it's not perfect--Carrey's detail sketches show a fair amount of damage to many of the sculptures and pediments, but overall the structure was still standing and in decent order.

The OCD remarks that it had been re-roofed at some point (not surprising--the Parthenon was used as a church and a mosque), but the Parthenon would not have been completely recognizable. It had suffered serious damage in a fire and was repaired sometime around the 3rd Century, and statues and inscriptions had been added to for some time. The temple had been plundered and desecrated several times by late antiquity, first by Demetrius Poliorcetes in 304, and then subsequently by Lachares and then again when the Heruli captured the city in 267, A.D. The colossal statues of Athena Promachus and Athena Parthenus were removed some time around the 4th or 5th Centuries, probably to Constantinople, and have been lost. Many of the metopes were damaged by Christians, and upon its conversion into the Church of St Mary it was painted with icons of the saints, which were whitewashed over when the Turks captured the city. Multiple other alterations were made, including altars added and removed, prayer rooms added and removed, a minaret added and removed, and various icons, pulpits, etc.

Most of the buildings on the acropolis were not large enough to have any particular use, and they tended to be stripped down for use in making lime--marble is expensive and hard to quarry, after all. The Erechtheum was reoriented and had an apse installed, and when the Turks turned it into a harem they restored its position and removed the Christian additions, which restored its exterior appearance, although the interior was very different. The Franks turned the acropolis into a fortress, adding a tower to the Propylaea (visible in the back right corner of the acropolis in Carrey's painting) and raising the walls with battlements, which you can sort of make out in Carrey's painting--the classical acropolis had been a citadel, but had not needed battlements (these have since been removed). The Propylaea was damaged in a gunpowder explosion in 1656 (the Turks seem not to have learned their lesson) and the Frankish tower was not removed until 1874. The Temple of Nike was used as a fortification until 1687 when, under pressure from the Venetians, the Turks dismantled it completely and used the stones to shore up the wall--many of its original stones have been identified and were used in its restoration. The poor Propylaea was basically walled completely up. So the site was in rather bad shape compared to its Classical image, although it was not yet the lunar wasteland that the Venetian bombardment left it, and most of the large buildings still survived in decent shape--we should consider ourselves lucky that the original Venetian plan to tunnel under the acropolis and blow the whole thing up failed!