This is the Propylaea, the great marble gateway to the top of the Acropolis, and perched out on the bastion to its right is the little temple of Athena Nike. Before you go through the gate, look closely at the big blocks in its walls. Some of them still have small, square stone knobs sticking out of them. Those knobs are why this gate never got finished.
Ancient builders left knobs on their blocks so they could loop ropes around them and hoist them into place. Once the wall was up, a mason came along and chiseled the knobs off. Here, nobody ever came back with the chisel. The gateway was going up in the four-thirties B.C., and in four thirty-one, Athens went to war with Sparta. Work stopped, and it never started again. The grandest entrance in the ancient world is a building site frozen in the middle of the job, and those lifting knobs have been waiting twenty-four centuries for somebody to finish up.
The little temple on the corner has the opposite problem. It has been finished four
times.
It went up around the same years, a jewel box for Athena as the goddess of victory. Victory is usually shown with wings, but the statue here was called Wingless Victory. The explanation Greeks gave for centuries was that Athens had clipped her wings so she could never fly away.
In sixteen eighty-six, with a Venetian army on its way, the Ottoman garrison needed a gun platform on exactly t
