The Parthenon (447–432 BCE) is the most famous building of the ancient world and the single most influential piece of architecture in Western history. Built by Pericles as the centrepiece of his rebuilding programme after the Persian Wars, it was dedicated to Athena Parthenos — the virgin Athena — and once housed a 12-metre gold-and-ivory statue of the goddess by Pheidias.
For most of its life the building was not a ruin. It served as a Christian church for nearly a thousand years and then as an Ottoman mosque, complete with minaret, until 1687, when a Venetian artillery shell ignited the gunpowder the Turks had stored inside. The ruin we see today was created in a single afternoon. Look up at the surviving frieze — the sculptured battle scenes from the metopes — and remember that the cleanest examples, the so-called Elgin Marbles, sit in the British Museum and remain the most contested antiquities in the world.