The Acropolis Restoration Service announces that it has completed the western pediment of the Parthenon

The Acropolis Restoration Service has announced that it has completed the western pediment of the Parthenon. The external scaffolding has been removed from the western façade for good, for the first time in several decades. The Minister of Culture, Lina Mendoni, says that the façade now stands in its full form for the first time in 220 years.

At the start of the twentieth century Nikolaos Balanos fastened the blocks together with iron clamps, without any insulation. The iron rusted, expanded and tore the marble apart from within. The Monument Restoration Service, established in 1975, has spent half a century occupied chiefly with undoing the consequences of earlier restorations and later interventions: extracting Balanos's clamps, setting titanium ones in their place, and building up lost blocks.

The western pediment has been completed with two orthostats, that is, upright stone slabs. The first stone is assembled from two ancient fragments, stitched together with new marble. The second is made entirely of fresh Pentelic marble, quarried on the very same Mount Pentelicus from which the stone was taken two and a half thousand years ago. In time the marble will turn yellow from its iron-bearing impurities and acquire the famous golden tint