Visit Athens Guide
The Parthenon
The Parthenon is the temple of Athena at the top of the Acropolis, begun in 447 BC and finished in about fifteen years. It is not a separate site and has no ticket of its own: it stands inside the Acropolis fence, on the €30 entry that covers the whole rock. This page is about the building — what it was for, what happened to it, what the cranes are doing and how to look at it — as checked in Q3 2026. The practical visit is on the Acropolis page, the ticket on the Acropolis ticket page, and the wider plan on the Athens city guide homepage.
Quick answer What it was for, and why half of it is in London
The Parthenon is a temple to Athena, built under Pericles from 447 BC and designed by Iktinos with Kallikrates, with sculpture by Phidias. It housed a colossal gold-and-ivory statue of the goddess that has been lost since antiquity.
Key takeaways
- There is no Parthenon ticket. It is inside the Acropolis fence on the €30 site entry — how the ticket works has the rules.
- About half the surviving sculpture is in the British Museum, taken by Lord Elgin; the rest is in the Acropolis Museum, arranged to face the real building.
- The building was largely intact until 1687, when a Venetian shell hit the Ottoman powder store inside it — what happened to it is a shorter story than most people expect.
- The cranes are not a delay. The restoration has been running since 1975 and is designed to correct a botched earlier one.
- Best view of it is from off the rock: Philopappos Hill, free, an hour before sunset.
Key facts
Opening hours
| 1 April – 31 August, daily | 08:00–20:00 |
|---|---|
| 1–15 September, daily | 08:00–19:30 |
| 16–30 September, daily | 08:00–19:00 |
| 1–15 October, daily | 08:00–18:30 |
| 16–31 October, daily | 08:00–18:00 |
| 1 November – 31 March, daily | 08:00–17:00 |
Closed 1 January, 25 March, 1 May, Orthodox Easter Sunday, 25 and 26 December
Admission
- Adult
- €30 for the Acropolis, which includes the Parthenon
- Reduced
- €15
- Free
- 6 March, 18 April, 18 May, the last weekend of September, 28 October, and the first and third Sunday from 1 November to 31 March
Planning it
- Time needed
- Not stated; our routing: 30 minutes at the temple itself, 90 for the rock
- Book ahead
- Essential — weeks ahead
- Address
- Acropolis of Athens, 105 58 Athens
The Parthenon has no ticket of its own; these are the ways onto the rock it stands on, priced from hh.gr and GetYourGuide on 1 September 2026. The full comparison is on the Acropolis ticket page.
| Option | Price | Includes | Cancel | Book |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Official Acropolis ticket | €30 full / €15 reduced | The whole rock, this temple included | Non-refundable; two changes to 2h before | Official site |
| Entry with audio options | Listed at €36 | Timed entry, audio or live-guide option | Per listing | Check Availability |
| First-access guided tour | From €27 | Early entry, licensed guide, the temple first | Free up to 24 hours before | Check Availability |
| Rock and museum with a guide | From €34 | The temple and the frieze in one morning | Per listing | Check Availability |
If the sculpture matters to you, pair the rock with the museum: the frieze that is missing from the building is ten minutes downhill in the Acropolis Museum, and no official ticket covers both.
Ways to see the Parthenon
The cards behind the table, with the operator's own rating and review count.
from €36
Athens: Acropolis Ticket with Optional Audio or Live Guide
Pre-booked Acropolis entry sent to your phone, with two audio-guide options and no fixed guide to keep up with. The official price is €30; this is the reseller version of the same timed slot.
Check Availability
from €27
Athens: First Access Acropolis and Parthenon Guided Tour
An early-morning guided walk that goes to the Parthenon before the coach groups, then the Theatre of Dionysus on the south slope. Two to four hours depending on the option.
Check Availability
from €34
Athens: Acropolis, Parthenon & Acropolis Museum Guided Tour
An archaeologist takes the monuments on the rock and then the Parthenon gallery in the Acropolis Museum, where the frieze sits at eye level.
Check Availability
from €49
Athens: Parthenon, Acropolis and Museum Small Group Tour
Three hours in a small group with pre-reserved tickets, covering the Acropolis, the Parthenon and the museum below it in one run.
Check AvailabilityPrices, ratings and details are the platform's own, checked in Q3 2026; euro figures are the listed prices — the platform bills in your account's currency.
What the Parthenon was for
A treasury as much as a temple, and a political statement before either.
A temple to Athena Parthenos
The name comes from parthenos, maiden — the epithet of the goddess whose statue stood inside. That statue, made by Phidias in gold and ivory over a wooden core, was about twelve metres high and was the point of the building: the Parthenon was designed around it. It disappeared from the record in late antiquity and no fragment survives; every image of it is a reconstruction from Roman copies and descriptions.
And a treasury
The rear chamber held the treasure of the Delian League, the alliance Athens led and then dominated. The building programme that produced the Parthenon was paid for out of that common fund, which is why the temple was as much an argument about Athenian power as an act of piety. Pericles also defended the spending as employment: the ancient sources describe Athenians, foreigners, free men and slaves working on the site at a drachma a day.
Built fast, by hand, on a burnt site
The Persians sacked the Acropolis in 480 BC and burned what stood there, including an unfinished predecessor. Work on the Parthenon began in 447 BC and the building was substantially done within about fifteen years — an extraordinary pace for 100,000 tonnes of Pentelic marble cut, carted eighteen kilometres and fitted without mortar.
The refinements
Almost nothing in the Parthenon is straight. The stylobate curves upward slightly toward the centre, the columns lean inward and swell at mid-height, and the corner columns are thicker and closer to their neighbours. The usual explanation is optical — that the corrections make the building read as regular from a distance — though the ancient sources do not say so, and modern scholars argue about it.
What is not in dispute is that the deviations were deliberate and cut into the stone.
What happened to it
Twenty-three centuries as a working building, and one afternoon that ended it.
Church, then mosque
The Parthenon was converted to a Christian church, dedicated to the Virgin, in late antiquity, and after the Ottoman conquest it became a mosque with a minaret rising inside the cella. Both conversions did damage — the church cut an apse into the east end — but both kept the building roofed and in use, which is why it survived so nearly whole for so long.
26 September 1687
The Ottoman garrison used the Parthenon to store gunpowder during the Venetian siege of Athens. A Venetian mortar shell fired from the Hill of the Muses reached it, the powder went up, and the centre of the building was destroyed in a moment: the roof, most of the cella walls and a large part of the colonnade. Everything you see standing today was either left by that explosion or re-erected since.
Lord Elgin, from 1801
Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, then British ambassador to the Ottoman court, had a large part of the surviving sculpture removed and shipped to Britain — roughly half of what was left of the frieze, along with metopes, pedimental figures and one of the Erechtheion Caryatids. Part of the shipment sank off Kythira and was recovered. The material has been in the British Museum since 1816 and its return is a live diplomatic argument.
The Acropolis Museum's top floor is built to make that argument without a word: original blocks are set beside plaster casts of the ones in London, and the colours do not match.
The cranes, and why they are permanent
The scaffolding is the most misunderstood thing on the rock.
An earlier restoration made it worse
Between 1898 and 1933 Nikolaos Balanos re-erected large parts of the building using iron clamps set into the marble. Iron rusts, rust expands, and expanding iron splits stone from the inside. By the 1970s the earlier repair had become the main threat to the building.
What is happening now
The current programme has been running since 1975. It dismantles the Balanos work, replaces the iron with titanium, which does not corrode, cleans and consolidates the original marble and returns each block to its own place, adding new marble from the same Pentelic quarry only where a member cannot stand without it. That is slow, unglamorous and open-ended: expect cranes in your photographs for the foreseeable future.
What that means for a visit
You will not see the Parthenon without scaffolding, and no season or hour avoids it. What changes with the hour is the light on the columns — early morning and the last hour before closing in spring and autumn are when the marble goes gold and the cranes matter least. The Acropolis page has the closing times by season.
Seeing it properly
Three places to look at the Parthenon from, in ascending order of how good the photograph is.
The Acropolis itself
Close enough to read the flutes and the drill holes. €30 with a declared hour — the Acropolis has the gates and the hours.
On the rockAcropolis Museum
The top floor is the Parthenon's own dimensions with the frieze at eye level and the real building in the window. The museum is €20 and open to 22:00 on Fridays.
10 min walkPhilopappos Hill
The profile view across the saddle, free and open at all hours. Philopappos is where the photograph everyone recognises is taken.
15 min walkWhere the Parthenon stands, and where to look at it from
The temple on the rock, the two gates that reach it, and the two best places to see it from.
Parthenon questions
Are the Parthenon and the Acropolis the same?
No. The Acropolis is the rock and the whole fenced site on it; the Parthenon is the largest temple standing on that site. One ticket covers both, because the temple is inside the fence. The Acropolis page covers the visit.
What does Parthenon mean?
From parthenos, Greek for maiden — an epithet of Athena, whose colossal statue by Phidias stood inside the building. What it was for has the rest.
Why was the Parthenon destroyed?
By a single explosion. In 1687 the Ottoman garrison stored gunpowder inside it during a Venetian siege; a shell reached the store and blew out the centre of the building. Before that afternoon it had stood nearly intact for more than two thousand years as a temple, a church and a mosque.
What is the difference between the Parthenon and the Pantheon?
Different buildings, different cities, seven centuries apart. The Parthenon is a Greek Doric temple to Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, from the 440s BC. The Pantheon is a Roman domed temple to all the gods, in Rome, rebuilt under Hadrian in the AD 120s. The similarity is only in the name.
Where are the Parthenon marbles?
Split. About half the surviving sculpture is in the British Museum, removed by Lord Elgin from 1801; the rest is in the Acropolis Museum in Athens, where the top-floor gallery sets the originals beside casts of the London pieces.
Will the scaffolding ever come down?
Not soon. The restoration has been running since 1975, undoing an earlier repair whose iron clamps were splitting the marble, and it is deliberately slow. The restoration section explains what is being done.
Reviewed Q3 2026 (July–September 2026); next review Q4 2026. Prices, hours and terms are set by the venue or operator and confirmed at checkout.
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