storing black powder and ammunition there during the war

turned out to be a big mistake and responsible for most of the damage seen today

found lots of cats all around athens, many on this site, and they were friendly

more cats :)

christian church added later

Good views from the site, of course:

parthenon doesn't look nealy as good

The museum was good:

this was actually a sensus counter for voting

The temple was in pretty good shape:

Also found that athens had wild tortoises roaming around

took the less busy south entrance, got in a few mimutes

While expectations were probably higher than they should have been, overall the place had suffered too much damage over the years and looked a bit disappointing to me. The fact that it used to house a church for a while, and was also used a munition depot and that a lucky shot during a war, ignitied and exploded all the black powder, causing a huge explosion, did not help. I was disappointd that after 40 years of renovations, it still looked like mostly pile of rubble, but was told later that there is apparently some rule that says you can only add 30% of missing materials, beyond that you're supposed to leave things alone. This is not my field, but I'd have been happy to seen it rebuilt, even if other material, to get a better feel for it. Of course the fact that the british stole half of what was left of the 2 triangle roofs and are keeping it in the british museum, did not help.

what is left of the decorations, the rest were stolen by the british

michoko bird!

The side temple, Erechtheon, looked a bit better:

One big plus of that location is that you can see all of athens from it and see many other sights:

what left of the temple of Olympian Zeus

and the rebuilt Panathenic Stadium where the 2004 olympic games were held

So maybe it was a bit bittersweet, but still very nice to see this site that was on my bucket list for sure