How to read the city

The question everyone arrives with is how much of this is original? It is the wrong question, and on the Acropolis it will make you miserable.

The better one is what kind of object am I looking at — because the answer changes every few metres, and the changes are visible once you know they are there.

Some of what you see is ancient stone standing where it was put. Some is ancient stone taken down and reset by modern engineers. Some is an ancient fragment completed with new marble cut this century, and some is new marble altogether. And some is a replica standing in for something moved indoors: all six Caryatids on the Erechtheion porch are copies, the originals safe in the museum. New marble often reads paler and the joins can be found — but do not trust colour alone, because some supplements were deliberately patinated to match.

Down in the Agora, the same lesson in one building. The Stoa of Attalos looks like the most intact ancient structure in Athens. It is a 1950s reconstruction.

Then the harder thing. This classical ruin was partly made by subtraction. A Frankish tower, a mosque inside the Parthenon, Christian and Ottoman building on that rock — nineteenth-century archaeology removed them to produce a properly classical national monument. What you stand in is not so much a surviving ancient site as an edited one, and much of the editing is modern.

Two smaller things worth carrying up. The plateau is engineered, held by some 740 metres of circuit wall rather than being the natural crown of the hill. And the broad stone paths that make the whole archaeological zone feel like one continuous place are a deliberate twentieth-century composition, not an ancient route.

The marble was painted, incidentally — red, blue, green. Almost none of that survives anywhere you could see it standing outdoors. Look for it in the museum instead, and do not expect much.

Nine Kinds of Old — what the different marbles actually are, the mosque and the tower that were removed to make this classical, and the newest stone on the Parthenon.