The Beulé Gate

About this place

A fortified gate at the western entrance to the Acropolis, which you pass through on the way up to the Propylaea, and which most visitors cross without noticing that its age is entirely different from everything around it. The gate is not classical. It was built in the third century AD — seven hundred years after the Parthenon — when the Herul tribes overran Athens in 267 and destroyed the lower city. The Athenians fell back onto the Acropolis and fortified it anew, so the temple became a fortress. The material shows it: the gate was built of reused stone, most of it from the choragic monument of Nicias that stood below the slope and was demolished for the purpose. You can see the old inscriptions upside down or cut through in the wall. This says something about Athens in those centuries: a poor, besieged city dismantling its monuments to build its walls. It is named after the French archaeologist Charles Beulé, who uncovered it in 1852.