The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens (review)

Not surprisingly, the recent opening of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens sparked renewed rounds of controversy over Greece's most famous monument. The return of the so-called Elgin Marbles looms large in the discussion, but an animated film commissioned for the museum by Oscar-winning director Costa-Gavras has also generated its share of discussion. Depicting the millennial history of the Parthenon, one scene shows black-clad early Christians defacing the sculpture prior to its conversion to a church. Greek ecclesiastical officials found the scene offensive, and accordingly it was cut. Authorial protest, public outcry, and a promise of restitution quickly followed. As the episode demonstrates, with the appropriation of the Parthenon as a national symbol, it is difficult to keep all stakeholders happy. But buildings have histories, and as a transcendent aesthetic achievement, the Parthenon lent itself to adaptive re-use as its cultural and religious context changed. Although its later history is nowhere apparent in the present structure, the afterlife of the Parthenon has been examined in several recent books, including Mary Beard, The Parthenon (2003) and Jenifer Neils, ed., The Parthenon from Antiquity to the Present (2005). In both, however, the later history takes a back seat to the temple's classical glory.

In this timely and provocative essay, Anthony Kaldellis attempts to redirect our focus, arguing that the Byzantine period was the true age of glory for the Parthenon, when it functioned as a church dedicated to the Theotokos and as a pilgrimage center. To do so, however, he provides bald statements destined to irritate just about everyone. For the classicist: "The Parthenon as a church was more important than it had been as a temple" (18). For the Byzantinist: "Athens had become the most important Christian city in the empire and had usurped the place of Constantinople as the preeminent city dedicated to the Theotokos" (133). For the historian: "Byzantine Athens was not a city without a history, as is commonly believed" (dust jacket and elsewhere). For the Greek nationalist: "The modern Parthenon was in a sense a monument of Byzantine manufacture" (19). And for those like myself who have written about the medieval Parthenon: "This book unveils for the first time a nearly 1,000-year-long chapter in the history of the Parthenon and the city of Athens . . ." (xi). For the pedantic checkers of references, like myself: "The index does not include names that recur throughout the book: Akropolis; Athena; Atheniotissa; Athens, Attika, Byzantium, Constantinople, Jerusalem and the Holy Land: Maria; Parthenon; Parthenos; Theometor; Theotokos . . ." (249). And to puzzle the general reader: "Byzantine names are not Latinized or Anglicized but spelled correctly" (xiii). Even as a Byzantinist, I stumbled at every Konstantinos for Constantine, Kostas for Constans, Basileios for Basil, hymnos for hymn, wondering what the point was. Shouldn't they have been left in Greek characters as well?

I have no doubt the book was intended to be polemical, and Kaldellis is a master of reading between the lines to find just the right nuance in the absence of firm information to drive his points home—although he occasionally admits, "we are on shaky ground here" (e.g., 143). While assembling texts from a variety of periods, Kaldellis refuses to quantify his data or to put it into a broader perspective: the Parthenon "received the sincere devotion of thousands" and "was adored by emperors, monks, and pilgrims from all over Christendom, from England to Armenia" (193). By my count: one emperor, four monks, one Anglo-Saxon pilgrim on his way to Jerusalem, and a few Armenian students who never mention the building. In Kaldellis's telling, every visit to the Parthenon constituted a pilgrimage and every visit to Athens must have included the Parthenon.

While Kaldellis finds surprising nuances in every text he examines, his overarching themes remain remarkably lacking in nuance. For example, what does he mean by pilgrimage? The word derives from the Latin peregrinus, meaning stranger or foreigner...