Free The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories by Edward Hollis Page B

the chariot of Apollo himself.

     
    L ESS THAN TWO decades later Napoleon had been deposed, and by 1814 his empire and its treasures were being carved up between thepowers that had defeated him. Denon, by now the director of the Louvre, fought tenaciously for his collection. The treasures of the Louvre belonged to France by right of conquest, he said. And also: the treasures of the Louvre had been the property of states that no longer existed, he said, and therefore there was no rightful owner to which they might be returned. And at the same time: the treasures of the Louvre were and always had been the property of the once deposed, now restored, monarchy of France, he said; they had been in the Louvre since time immemorial. No one believed him, and the troops of the allies who had defeated Napoleon came to repossess what belonged to their masters.
    But to whom might the
quadriga
be returned? Not only had it been stolen many times over, but it had indeed belonged to states that no longer existed. Macedon, Rome, Constantinople, and even the Republic of Venice were no more.
    Still, to the city of Venice the bronze horses were returned. Their new overlord, the emperor of Austria, was good enough to be present at their restitution on the facade of San Marco, even though Venice was now but a provincial port in his vast empire. Soon enough, they were put out to pasture, as it were, in the diocesan museum. There, stabled inside, they are protected by a sophisticated security system, so that no one can ever steal them again.

Ayasofya, Istanbul
     
    In Which a Sultan Casts a Spell and
Moves the Center of the World

     
     
    A R OMAN B UILDING S EEN T HROUGH M USLIM E YES
Miniature commemorating Selim II’s renovation of Ayasofya
and his burial there. From Seyyid Loktun,ehname-i Selim Han (1581).
     

A PPROPRIATION
     
    The Parthenon might have passed into the insubstantial realm of dreams altogether had it not been turned into a church—dedicated first to holy wisdom, then to the Virgin—and afterward transformed into a mosque by the conquering Ottoman empire. Each time the function of the Parthenon was changed, the building was converted: the front door was blocked up with an altar, and the original altar removed to make way for a new front door. But as each successive conversion was laid over the last one, the hold of Athene over the Parthenon was enriched, for she was the virgin goddess of wisdom with a figure of Victory in her hand.
    The people of the Dark Ages did not just vandalize the architecture of antiquity; they also turned it to new uses. When the barbarians came to Rome, they did not simply sack it; indeed, the buildings they encountered were often too solidly built to demolish. But having no use for theaters, temples, and fora, they turned them into fortresses for their warriors, prisons for their captives, and enclosures for their cattle.
    These were often brutal conversions, but it is thanks to them that any theaters, bathhouses, or fora have survived at all. We have inherited hybrid buildings, double-coded with both their original and their subsequent purposes. The Theater of Marcellus in Rome, for instance, is both a theater and a palace; the Forum of Trajan both a marketplace and a fortress.
    Ayasofya in Istanbul was once Hagia Sophia, the great church of the Roman Empire, and the place where that empire made its last stand. Its conversion into a mosque is a late example of the appropriation of anantique building. The terms of that appropriation were particularly controversial, and still are, since it involved nothing less than moving the center of the world.
    The Ayasofya we possess today is both church and mosque, both an antiquity and a very modern problem. It stands as a testament to the simultaneous reverence and scorn with which the inhabitants of the Dark Ages treated the buildings they had inherited from their classical forebears.

 
     
     
     
     
    O NCE UPON A TIME the center of the world was