Restoring the Ruin
Undoing past doings
Before the restoration team could
begin, they had to take apart, block by block, and repair nearly every piece of
the Parthenon. That's because early restorers, most notoriously a Greek
engineer named Nikaloas Balanos who led restorations from the late 1800s to the
mid-1900s, put column drums and whole blocks back in the wrong place. Even more
damaging, Balanos used iron clamps like the one seen here to hold blocks
together. The ancient Greeks had done the same, but they had coated their iron
with lead to prevent rusting. Balanos's uncovered clamps corroded and
expanded, cracking and even destroying the marble.