Ancient stone still standing where it was set. Ancient stone repaired in antiquity. Ancient blocks taken down and put back by modern engineers. Ancient fragments completed with new marble. Members that are entirely new marble. Artificial-stone replicas standing in for originals that have been moved indoors. Ancient blocks reused as building material by people who came later. Wholly modern reconstruction. And modern paving, planting and circulation that is not a monument at all but is the ground you walk on.
None of that is a scandal. It is what a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old building looks like when it has been continuously used, quarried, converted, bombarded, excavated and repaired — and the reason you can know all of it is that the people doing the current work publish what they do.
The most recent stone is younger than this book's research
In March 2026 two new blocks went into the west pediment. One combines ancient and new stone; the other is entirely new marble. The scaffolding that had stood there for years came down in June.
So on the day you look at it, the newest part of the Parthenon will be about six months old.
New marble usually reads paler and the joins can often be found. But do not trust colour as a test — some supplements were deliberately patinated to match, which means the building will sometimes tell you the truth and sometimes tell you what an earlier generation thought you wanted.
What was taken away
The harder half. This classical monument was partly produced by removing everything that was not classical.
There was a Frankish tower at the entrance. There was a mosque inside the Parthenon. There was Christian and Florentine and Ottoman building on that rock, centuries of it, and nineteenth-century archaeology cleared it to bedrock in order to make a properly classical national monument. Those histories are secure. Several of them now exist mainly as documented absence.
Restoration has not been a steady improvement either. An earlier twentieth-century campaign used iron and cement, cut ancient blocks to fit, and reused fragments in the wrong places; a great deal of the work since 1975 has been undoing it. The monument you see is not ancient fabric plus careful repair. It is ancient use, later reuse, deliberate erasure, a bad restoration and a careful one, all present at once, mostly in the same building.
The ground is designed too
The wide stone paths that make the whole archaeological zone feel like one continuous place are a twentieth-century composition — stone, tile, concrete, and rubble from demolished buildings in the city, assembled deliberately. They are very good, and they are not a route anyone walked in antiquity.
The broad accessibility surfaces added in 2021 are a live argument. A heritage body criticised their material and their effect; the architect responsible says a membrane separates the concrete from the ancient stone and makes the whole thing removable. Nobody has resolved that, and this book is not going to. What is worth knowing is that the surface under your feet is neither ancient nor neutral, and that somebody chose it recently.
Two things you will not be able to see
The marble was painted. Hematite red, Egyptian blue, mineral greens, and the drilled holes where metal attachments once sat. Almost none of it survives where you could see it standing outdoors — the museum is where to look, and even there some of what you see has changed: green on one figure is read as blue that oxidised.
And the famous refinements — the curved floor, the columns that swell and lean inward, the tightened corner spacing. Those are real and they are measured. What the evidence does not establish is that a visitor can reliably perceive them standing in front of the building on an ordinary day, or that the measurements prove any particular intention. It is a wonderful fact and a poor errand. Do not spend twenty minutes trying to see it.
The question worth carrying up
Not how much is original, which has nine answers and no useful one.
Try instead: what kind of object is this, right here? Ask it at the Erechtheion porch, where every caryatid is a copy. Ask it at the west pediment, six months old. Ask it on the path, which is ninety years old and made partly of demolished Athens.
The building does not become less impressive when you can tell the difference. It becomes a great deal more interesting, because you are finally looking at what is actually there.