Sunday, June 14, 2015

Views of the World, Acropolis, Athens, Greece



The nice thing about these on going, from time to time, collections, is that there's always something to fall back on.  Anyway, I've had these tinted postcards for decades, and by clicking on Views of the World in labels, the others can be seen.

The Acropolis is actually the mountain top, not the colonnaded building.  That's the Parthenon.  Construction began on the best known buildings of the Acropolis in the second half of the 5th century B.C. under the leadership of Athenian statesman, Pericles.  The Parthenon was pretty much intact until 1687 when it was damaged during an artillery bombardment during the Morean War between Venice and The Ottoman Empire.  From 1801 to 1812, Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin stole many of the marble sculptures from The Acropolis.  He was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, (Greece was part of the empire, at the time.)  and may have had permission to take them.  Nevertheless, I'm sticking with theft as a description.  He sold them to The British Museum.

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