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barren plains of their alien kingdom. Schinkel’s palace was a bold appropriation of a remnant of ancient Greece in the service of the modern nation. Still, just as his contemporary the great Canova had refused to raise his chisel against the marble that Phidias had touched, Schinkel’s design left the stones of the Parthenon itself unaltered: an ancient jewel in a modern setting.
    But Schinkel was not the only German architect with an interest in the Parthenon. The court architect of Bavaria, like Schinkel, had built a few of them himself. When, after the defeat of Napoleon, the king of Bavaria wanted to honor the fallen heroes of his country with a monument, he commissioned Leo von Klenze; and Klenze, like the citizens of Edinburgh, knew exactly where to turn for a model. His Parthenon, the Valhalla, was set on a series of terraces above the river Danube at Regensburg. Within it, the heroes of the Bavarian—and then the German—nation are immortalized in marble. (A committee still sits to decide who will join the exalted ranks in the Valhalla; one of the latest additions was Sophie Scholl, the young woman who resisted Hitler and paid for it with her life.)
    Because of his Bavarian connections, Klenze had access to the court of King Otto, and he dismissed Schinkel’s proposed palace with faint praise as “a charming midsummer night’s dream.” So in 1834, when Otto ascended the Acropolis, it was not to lay the cornerstone of a new
Residenz
, or, indeed, to do anything new at all. Unlike Demetrius Poliorcetes, the emperor Theodosius, the Holy League, or the armies of Sultan Mehmet, King Otto came to bring the repeated violations of the Parthenon to an end.
    The whole event had been designed by Leo von Klenze. The king was, naturally, trussed up in all the uncomfortable corsetry and frogging of his rank; but his people, the maidens and the youths of Athens, were dressed in the simple robes of their ancestors and carried branches of myrtle. The king sat in front of the Parthenon in all his finery, and Klenze ascended a rostrum. He spoke in German:
     
Your majesty stepped today, after so many centuries of barbarism, for the first time on this celebrated Acropolis, proceeding on the road of civilization and glory, on the road passed upon by the likes of Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon and Pericles, and this is, and should be, in the eyes of your people, the symbol of your glorious reign . . . All the remains of barbarity will be removed . . . and the remains of the glorious past will be revealed in a new light, as the foundations of a glorious present and future.
     
    Since that time, the Acropolis has been the ground upon which the consequences of Klenze’s plan have been played out—in constructions, reconstructions, demolitions, legal cases, learned papers, and diplomatic missions. Generation by generation, on behalf of the modern nation of Greece and in memory of the Athens of Athene, people have attempted to put the Parthenon back together again: to make it whole and perfect, like a virgin.
    The first fifty years of this process involved the eradication of all of those “remains of barbarity” that had sullied the Parthenon since classical times. The guards were expelled from the little building that stood on the marble pavement of the Parthenon, and the cottages and gardens and the harem of the Turks were all demolished. When these weregone, the remains of more ancient violations were also removed. The ruins of the minaret of the Ottoman mosque, which had once been the bell tower of the church of Holy Wisdom, were taken down; with them went the mihrab, which had once been the apse of the church, which had once been imagined to be the ancient throne of Plato.
    Then the very ground itself was excavated. Until the 1830s, the Acropolis was covered in gardens, though now it is almost impossible to imagine anything growing on the bare rock scattered with broken columns and pieces of cornice. Underneath the Turkish