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.