Propylaea of Athens

Feel the stone under your feet. It is worn smooth, polished by centuries of sandals, boots and sneakers, and in places it is slippery as glass. Around you, white marble columns rise in rows, and the air carries dust, warm stone and the voices of a dozen languages. This is the Propylaea, the great gateway to the Acropolis. Nearly everyone who has climbed this hill in the last two and a half thousand years has passed through here, just as you are doing now.

The name simply means 'the gates in front'. It was never a temple, and it held no cult statue. Its job was to prepare you. The ancient Athenians believed that the top of this rock belonged to the gods, above all to Athena, the city's patron goddess. So the passage from the ordinary world below to the sacred world above had to feel like a transformation. This building was designed to create that feeling.

Work began in 437 BCE, during the years when the statesman Pericles was leading Athens. The Parthenon was nearly complete, and the city wanted an entrance worthy of it. The architect was Mnesikles. We know very little about his life, but this building is his signature. He faced a difficult problem. The ground here slopes steeply, and the rock is uneven. He had to fit a symmetrical, formal gateway onto a hillside that was neither symmetrical nor formal.

Look at how he solved it. The building has a central hall, with a wing on each side. From below, it looks like a temple front, with six heavy Doric columns. Doric is the plainer Greek style, with simple, cushion-like tops on the columns. But inside the central passage, the columns change. They become Ionic, the more slender style, with scroll-shaped tops. Mnesikles mixed the two styles in one building, which was a bold choice for its time.

Now look ahead to the back wall of the central hall. It has five doorways, and they are not the same size. The middle one is the widest and tallest. Here is a detail that many visitors miss. The central passage has no steps. It was a ramp. During the great festival for Athena, called the Panathenaia, the procession climbed through here with chariots, riders and sacrificial animals. Cattle cannot easily climb marble stairs, so the middle path stayed smooth.

The main stone is Pentelic marble, quarried from Mount Pentelikon, a mountain about sixteen kilometres northeast of the city. It is the same marble used in the Parthenon. When fresh, it is almost pure white, but over time the iron inside it gives it a warm, honey-coloured tone. Look closely, and you may notice darker, grey-blue stone in some places, used as a contrast. This darker stone came from Eleusis, west of Athens. Mnesikles used colour as part of the design.

Turn to your left as you face the hill, towards the northern wing. In ancient times, this room was known as the Pinakotheke, a word that means 'picture gallery'. The Greek travel writer Pausanias visited in the second century and described paintings displayed here. Scholars still discuss how it was used. Some think it was also a dining room for important guests. Either way, it is one of the earliest known spaces in Europe described as a place to look at pictures.

Now the second surprise. This building was never finished. In 431 BCE, the long Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta began, and money and attention moved elsewhere. Construction stopped. Look at the outer walls of the wings, and you may see small rectangular bumps sticking out of some blocks. These are lifting bosses. Builders used them to move the stones with ropes, and normally they were cut away at the end. Here, they remain — frozen in the moment when the work stopped.

To the right, on a tall bastion of rock, stands the small Temple of Athena Nike, the goddess of victory. The southern wing of the Propylaea is shorter than the northern one. Historians have long believed that Mnesikles cut it back, perhaps because the sacred area of that temple could not be disturbed. In front of the northern wing, notice also a tall, plain pedestal. In Roman times, it held a bronze statue group, later dedicated to Marcus Agrippa, a general and friend of the emperor Augustus.

The gateway had a long life after antiquity. In the Middle Ages it became a residence. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Florentine dukes ruled Athens, they turned it into a palace. A tall stone tower was built on the southern wing, and for centuries it dominated the view of the Acropolis. That tower was taken down in 1875. Old photographs and drawings still show it, so some visitors are surprised to learn how different this entrance looked only a few generations ago.

Under Ottoman rule, the building was used to store gunpowder. In 1656, lightning struck, and the explosion destroyed part of the structure. Much of the damage you see comes from that moment, and from later wars on the hill. Since the late twentieth century, restoration teams have been working carefully here. You may notice blocks of new, brighter marble set among the old ones. These replacements are intentional. They allow the restorers to support the structure without hiding what is original.

As you walk through, look up. The ceilings of the central hall were made of marble beams and deep, square panels called coffers. In ancient times, these panels were painted, and some fragments show traces of blue and of decorative stars. Pausanias wrote that the ceiling was remarkable for the size of its stones. Imagine the colours, the shade, the cool air inside after the bright climb. Then imagine stepping out the other side, and seeing the Parthenon for the first time.

That is still the experience today. Pause for a moment at the top, before you move on. Behind you, the city spreads out to the sea, and the sound of traffic rises faintly from below. Ahead, the plateau opens in light and white stone. You are standing in a gateway built for gods, left unfinished by war, and repaired by many hands. When you leave later today, you will pass through it again — and perhaps notice something new.