The Pantheon and the Hephaestus Temple by Zander

the Acropolis temple wich is diwarfed by the Parthenon.

the Parthanon, wich makes the mall look like a dog house.

the Haphesits temple with not much restoration done to it.

                I think that it is really cool that some of the Greek temples have survived to the present day. What really helped all the temples and Greek buildings stay intact was that Athens, Greece has been buried under a few hundred feet of dirt until when. The Hephaestus (the god of stone masons, and iron work) temple has survived because it is his temple and it has to be really sturdy. I am really glad that the temple of Hephaestus is still standing and mostly intact, so that I could see how they really looked back in the day.ephaestus temple has been preserved for a few hundred years. On top of the buried temple, many events took place on the site of ancient Athens. Athens, or what was left of Athens, was a strategic place in the crusades. The Parthenon was a major fort with a giant crusader tower. It was also fought over in WWI.  After WWI, Athens was in the Greek revolution. Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire for a long time.  The Greeks revolted, and they beat the Ottomans on land, then they killed the Ottomans in a great navy battle off the coast. I am really amazed that a temple has survived so long and through so many wars.  The Hephaestus temple survived through all the wars because it was deeply buried so it wasn’t damaged.

                There is a really Interesting story about the creation of Athens. Long ago, Athena was in the Parthenon and Hephaestus was making stuff in his work shop. Hephaestus fell in love with Athena, so Hephaestus jumped her. Of course, Athena was a maiden goddess, she couldn’t have kids. She made Hephaestus get off her. Hephaestus was a little too excited, so he dripped some sperm on her. She swiped it of onto the ground. Then the Athenians were from where the sperm hit the ground. I think that whoever made up that story was really creative.

                The Acropolis is the famous Temple of Athena, the patron goddess of Athens which dominates the city of Athens. To figure out who was going to be the God/ Goddess of Athens, there was a contest between Poseidon, the god of the sea, and Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war. They both gave a gift to Athens. Poseidon gave a salt water spring.  Athena gave the olive tree. Of course, Athena won. The Acropolis isn’t a temple “acropolis” means “high city”. There is a temple on the mountain, but it is way smaller than the Pantheon which is the treasury of Athens.  The Acropolis would have been in better shape, if not for the Ottomans.  They used it to store their gun powder.  Since they were in the middle of a war, it got blown up, and that is why it isn’t in good shape. I think that the Greeks are really cool.  How they built the Acropolis for Athena was pretty nice. I just wish that it hadn’t been blown up.

                The Athenians had it all figured out:  they “knew how they were made”, they knew who their patron god was, and they built a big structure in honor of her. In the 1800s, the president of Greece wanted to live where the famed city of Athens was. So they started to excavate it. He also wanted to live on the Acropolis and have the Temple of Athena in his back yard. Of course, nobody was going to let that happen, so he got some botanical gardens instead. I wouldn’t have settled for that. But before they excavated, the only thing that you could see was the Acropolis.  Everything else was underground. It is really cool that Ancient Athens has been preserved so well, even though it was buried for so long.