The Acropolis of Athens counts among the world’s greatest architectural and artistic monuments. Visitors come to admire the marble buildings that testify to the glory of Ancient Greece more than two millennia ago. Typically, only little attention is paid to the site’s rich medieval and Ottoman history. But one of the few stories commonly told about this period concerns the temple with six iconic sculptures of maidens, the so-called Caryatids.
Ancient Athenians built the temple with the Caryatids as the holiest shrine for Athena, the goddess of wisdom. In the medieval period, it was used as a church. But its fate supposedly changed dramatically following the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Athens in the 15th century. The story goes that the Muslim Turks had no interest in preserving the temple’s sacrality, and instead converted it into something radically different: a harem. This was said to be the residence of the Turkish castle warden’s wives and sometimes thought of as a place of seduction.
