The building, made to house the statue of Athena Polias, has in modern scholarship been called the Erechtheion (the sanctuary of Erechtheus or Poseidon) in the belief that Pausanias’ description of the Erechtheion applies to this building.

The joint cult of Athena and Poseidon-Erechtheus appears to have been established on the Acropolis at a very early period, and they were even worshipped in the same temple as may, according to the traditional view, be inferred from two passages in Homer and also from later Greek texts.

The extant building is the successor of several temples and buildings on the site. Its precise date of construction is unknown; it has traditionally been thought to have been built from circa 421–406 BC, but more recent scholarship favours a date in the 430s, when it could have been part of the programme of works instigated by Pericles.

The Erechtheion is unique in the corpus of Greek temples in that its asymmetrical composition doesn’t conform to the canon of Greek classical architecture. This is attributed either to the irregularity of the site, or to the evolving and complex nature of the cults which the building housed, or it is conjectured to be the incomplete part of a larger symmetrical building.

Additionally, its post-classical history of change of use, damage and spoliation has made it one of the more problematic sites in classical archaeology. The precise nature and location of the various religious and architectural elements within the building remain the subject of debate. The temple was nonetheless a seminal example of the classical Ionic style, and was highly influential on later Hellenistic, Roman and Greek Revival architecture.

History

The classical Erechtheion is the last in a series of buildings approximately on the mid-north site of the Acropolis of Athens, the earliest of which dates back to the late Bronze Age Mycenaean period.

The archaeology under the Erechtheion is also poorly evidenced for the archaic and early classical periods. Despite this a number of proposals have been made for a structure on the site immediately before the Achaemenid destruction of Athens in 480 BC. Orlandos reconstructs an obliquely orientated hexastyle amphiprostyle temple, which would have contained the “trident marks” in its pronaos.

Others restore a number of temene adjacent to the Temple of Athena Polias or a tetrastyle naiskos. To the south of the Erechtheion site would have been the Dörpfeld Foundations Temple, now thought to be the archaic Temple of Athena Polias, the foundations of which are visible on the acropolis today. Examination of the remains of the north edge of this temple by Korres might suggest the boundaries of the pre-Ionic Erechtheion site and therefore determine the shape of the classical temenos. Korres argues that a columnar monument marking the kekropeion would have been approximately where the Porch of the Maidens is, and that there was a stoa for the Pandroseion adjacent.

The building accounts for the classical Erechtheion from 409–404 BC have survived allowing an unusually secure dating of the construction of the temple.

Nevertheless, the question remains when was the building project inaugurated? There is no primary evidence for when construction began which is conjectured to be either the 430s, or 421 during the Peace of Nikias. The latter is broadly the consensus view, the rationale being that this lull in the long Peloponnesian war would have been the most convenient time to begin a major construction project and that there was a likely hiatus in building during the Sicilian disaster of 413. Alternatively, dates as early as the mid-430s and as late as 412 have been put forward. Work seems to have ended in 406–405 and the last accounts were from 405–404 though some mouldings were never finished and some of the bosses of some stone blocks were not chiselled off.

The names of the architect-overseers (episkopos), Philokles and Archilochos, have come down to us. They worked on the site after 409. But the identity of the architect (architecton) is unknown. Several candidates have been suggested; namely, Mnesikles, Kallikrates and Iktinos.

The subsequent history of the building has been one of damage, restoration and change of use, which complicates the task of reconstructing the original structure. The first recorded fire that the classical building suffered was perhaps 377–376, a second more severe fire took hold sometime in 1st century BC or earlier followed by a campaign of repair.

The Erechtheion along with the Parthenon suffered a further major destruction at some point in the 3rd or 4th century AD, whether this was due to Herulian or Visigoth attack or a natural disaster is unclear. After which, Julian the Apostate undertook the reconstruction of the Parthenon as a pagan temple in circa AD 361 and 363, at which point the Parthenon was the only attested site of the cult of Athena on the Acropolis, implying that the Erechtheion had been abandoned.

In the post-classical period, the Erechtheion was subject to a number of structural changes that must be assumed to be have been prompted by the building’s adaptation to Christian worship. The first was its conversion to a pillared hall with a groin vaulted roof at some point in the 4th century. In the late 6th or 7th century, the Erechtheion was converted into a three-aisled basilica church with the West Corridor serving as the narthex. The central portion of the east foundations was removed to make room for a curved apse.

In the 12th century, the basilica was renovated. The round apse was enlarged and was given straight sides on the exterior. The chancel screen was extended to the North and South Walls. During the Frankish occupation (1204–1458), the Erechteion was deconsecrated and changed to a Bishop’s residence, probably for the Catholic bishops of Athens who held mass in the Latin Cathedral of Church of Our Lady of Athens. With the advent of Ottoman control and the adaptation of the Acropolis plateau to a garrison, the Erechtheion took on its final incarnation as the Dizdar’s harem.

However, new research questions whether the building was actually in use as a harem, as this is not found in Turkish sources. This final period of the building’s use also witnessed the beginning of traveller’s accounts and architectural recording of the structure along with its despoilation by antique collectors. Perhaps the greatest damage to the edifice came with the siege of 1826–1827, when the Maiden porch and west facade were felled by cannon fire and the masonry joints were scavenged for lead. This ruined state is the condition of the site that prompted the first major anastylosis of the Erechtheion by Kyriakos Pittakis between 1837 and 1840.