Dusk on the Acropolis, Athens, Greece

The Acropolis in Athens, Greece, has served as a religious ritual center, fortress, harem, church, and tourist-stop supreme through the centuries.Used as an armory by Turkish soldiers while fighting with the Venetian army (this is during a war between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Venice, 1687), stored explosives accidentally went off from an overhead exploding cannon shell, and the Parthenon roof blew to pieces. In 1827 Turkish artillery hit the Erechtheion (this during the Greek war of independence), wrecking some of the Karyatid statuary, and an 1894 earthquake did additional damage. Tourists and archeologists removed many pieces from off the Acropolis (the most famous being the "Elgin Marbles,' which are sections of the Parthenon shipped to England between 1801 and 1812 by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin. Elgin took claim to approximately half of the then surviving statuary through some arrangement with the ruling Turkish Ottoman officials. Elgin claimed he was spurred toward this because statuary was being damaged and sometimes burned up in an effort to gain lime by the Ottomans. His collection was consequently sold to the British government a few years later at half of what Elgin spent in order to ship the pieces to his home. The effort to have the pieces returned to Greece has so far produced no result, a story covered in the 2009 book "Loot" by Sharon Waxman.

The Acropolis mount is 156 meters (512 feet) above sea level.