The Theseum and the Acropolis

The title is the name Athenians used when this was painted, around 1895. The temple was the Theseion then, on the belief that the bones of Theseus lay there after Kimon brought them back from the island of Skyros. Inscriptions found inside settled the matter later in favour of Hephaestus, the god of the forge, and that is the name on the site today. The building kept its roof and its columns because it spent centuries serving as the Orthodox church of Saint George, and after Greek independence it held Athens's first archaeological museum for a while. When Giallinas painted this sheet, the ground between the temple and the Acropolis was still a crowded Athens neighbourhood called Vrysaki. Between 1931 and 1939 some 348 properties there were expropriated and pulled down so that the ancient Agora could be excavated.