0:03 [SPEAKER_01]: When you think of ancient Greece, what images pop into your head? 0:07 [SPEAKER_01]: You probably think of the Olympics, and philosophers, like Plato and Socrates. 0:13 [SPEAKER_01]: You might think of stories like the Odyssey, in the Iliad, that you are forced to read in high school. 0:19 [SPEAKER_01]: And if you close your eyes and picture one ancient Greek building, a bet you are picturing the Parthenon, the iconic temple complex located on the hierarchy hilltop overlooking the city of Athens. 0:31 [SPEAKER_01]: Surrounded by towering ring of white marble pillars, this structure has become a picturesque symbol of ancient Greece and by extension of Greek democracy. 0:41 [SPEAKER_01]: If you'd ever like to see the Parthenon in person, in Athens is too far away, that's okay because there are two of them. 0:48 [SPEAKER_01]: The other is in Nashville. 0:50 [SPEAKER_01]: A full-scale replica complete with a 42-foot golden goddess in the inner chamber. 0:56 [SPEAKER_01]: The Nashville Parthenon was built for the World Fair in 1897, also known as the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition, and has since been converted into a public museum. 1:10 [SPEAKER_01]: I visited this museum myself this spring and I set down with the current director to learn more. 1:18 [SPEAKER_00]: My name is Lauren Buffard, and I am the acting director at the Parthenon. 1:22 [SPEAKER_00]: The Parthenon in Greece was the Temple to Athena. 1:29 [SPEAKER_00]: It is part of the Acropolis, which is a whole outcropping of buildings that were 1:36 [SPEAKER_00]: There's not really a difference in classical great culture between civic and religious but combination of all those things and it's about 2,500 years old. 1:49 [SPEAKER_01]: Where would worship and sacrifice uptake in place in the original temple? 1:54 [SPEAKER_00]: Everything would have happened on the exterior of the building. 1:57 [SPEAKER_00]: The people inside the building would have been priests. 2:00 [SPEAKER_00]: When we think of those sacrifices, that would have been an altar that would have all been on the exterior of the building. 2:07 [SPEAKER_00]: So for people who were living in ancient Greece at the time, they wouldn't have come to the Parthenon. 2:14 [SPEAKER_00]: and come inside to practice the way we would go to the witcher tourist in a god. 2:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Everything would have been on the exterior of the building. 2:20 [SPEAKER_00]: And the statue would have been taken care of on the inside. 2:24 [SPEAKER_00]: There was also a few were upstairs and you saw there was that room behind Athena. 2:29 [SPEAKER_00]: That was the place in the temples where the city or the city states would have kept their gold, their riches, their 2:39 [SPEAKER_00]: and slash religion slash government place. 2:42 [SPEAKER_00]: So we call that space the treasury. 2:44 [SPEAKER_00]: But again, it would not have been a public space. 2:48 [SPEAKER_01]: The most striking thing about the Parthenon is the gigantic 42 foot tall golden statue of Athena in the main hall upstairs. 2:57 [SPEAKER_01]: I asked Lauren what the model for that statue had been. 3:01 [SPEAKER_00]: There was a statue of Athena in the original person on. 3:05 [SPEAKER_00]: It is long gone, no one knows what happened to it. 3:08 [SPEAKER_00]: It was covered with gold. 3:10 [SPEAKER_00]: It was painted the way our statue is painted. 3:13 [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of people don't know that Greek sculpture would have been painted and had color. 3:18 [SPEAKER_00]: They think of it as the figures it's just being white. 3:21 [SPEAKER_00]: But our Athena is modeled on 3:24 [SPEAKER_00]: the Athena that was in Greece. 3:26 [SPEAKER_00]: There are written descriptions of what she looked like. 3:28 [SPEAKER_00]: Tourism was still a thing or was originally a thing in ancient Greece so you would have had religious turists or people living in other areas that would have come to see the Parthenon just because it was spectacular then the way it's spectacular now and so there are descriptions from all kinds of people there are also Roman copies. 3:47 [SPEAKER_00]: So when Alan the Choir, who is the sculptor of Arathena, was researching, he was working with scholars. 3:56 [SPEAKER_00]: and most of the things that are on Arthena are similar to what would have been on the original Athena, there's some scholarship now that suggests that the snake was on the other side, those are the basic high points of Athena, her headdress, her shield, the snake, all those things would have been on the original sculpture. 4:20 [SPEAKER_01]: Standing in front of that statue is worth the price of admission alone, and it's worth noting that this is the only place in the world you can have that experience. 4:30 [SPEAKER_01]: As the original, no longer exists. 4:33 [SPEAKER_01]: Lauren reminded me that this experience would have been impossible, even in ancient Greece, as only priests were allowed inside the building. 4:42 [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's one of the things that's really unique about our building is that you can experience what that space must have been like, even though people of Athens weren't experiencing that on a regular basis, because as I said, all the religious, the procession, the sacrifice is everything was done on the exterior, but you wouldn't have been able to... 5:01 [SPEAKER_00]: see in on those days and see her grandeur there is some scholarship that says that there was a pool of water in front of her that would help hydrate the materials that she was made of but also with of made just an amazing reflection if you can imagine like the sun coming in and hitting the water and the gold and the jewels that were her eyes it would have been really something else. 5:24 [SPEAKER_00]: There are other places that have built replicas of the Parthenon but they're not to scale and they are nowhere near as complete as ours is and we do have the only statue. 5:36 [SPEAKER_01]: In the classical world, gods and goddesses would have often been associated with specific cities and towns. 5:42 [SPEAKER_01]: We might think of them almost as divine mascots, but these relationships went much deeper. 5:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Based on a thing as a name, you can probably guess the ancient creeks city she was most associated with, or give you a moment to think about it. 5:57 [SPEAKER_00]: She is the patron goddess of Athens obviously because of her name and I don't know how much you looked at the exterior of the building when you were coming in but there are two triangular pieces of the architecture called pediments where the sculpture, where there is a sculpture on either side on the east and the west. 6:18 [SPEAKER_00]: One story is the birth of Athena. 6:21 [SPEAKER_00]: She sprang fully formed if you are 6:27 [SPEAKER_00]: great. 6:27 [SPEAKER_00]: She's brainfully formed from the head of Zeus. 6:30 [SPEAKER_00]: On the other side there is the story of the battle between Athena and Poseidon about who was going to be the patron god. 6:39 [SPEAKER_00]: of the city's state of Athens, and Athena won, so that on that side shows the battle between the two. 6:45 [SPEAKER_00]: So, for Athenians, Athena is an extremely important God, Godus, she is also the one who helped them in many of the wars that they were fighting with the other city's states around them. 6:59 [SPEAKER_00]: So, this building was built as offering to her, and that's her connection between Athens and the sculpture. 7:09 [SPEAKER_01]: I asked if the people of Athens would look to her for protection and things like economic prosperity and large, healthy families. 7:18 [SPEAKER_00]: I think all of the above, maybe not offspring, but definitely economic, prosperity, luck in war, she's, you know, if you know your Odyssey, she's all through the Odyssey to helping. 7:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, to see us in various ways. 7:34 [SPEAKER_01]: Originally, what was this land like before? 7:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Originally, it was hunting grounds for the Cherokee people that lived here before the land became used for the 1897 Tennessee Centennial. 7:48 [SPEAKER_00]: So that was a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the state of Tennessee. 7:52 [SPEAKER_00]: If you've ever seen pictures of 7:55 [SPEAKER_00]: the world's Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1892 or the St. Louis Exposition. 7:59 [SPEAKER_00]: This was like a turn of the century thing. 8:03 [SPEAKER_00]: It was civic pride. 8:05 [SPEAKER_00]: It was a way to get people to come to your state, build some equity, and Tennessee was celebrating their anniversary, but also, 8:15 [SPEAKER_00]: The 25 or so years of progress from the end of the Civil War, to the end of the 19th century. 8:23 [SPEAKER_00]: So this land became a six-month exposition, so there were buildings all over it, and also there's another piece of the park that kind of goes up the hill. 8:34 [SPEAKER_00]: All the buildings were built to be temporary. 8:37 [SPEAKER_00]: They were all made of the same material that was like a more sustained plaster of Paris, 8:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Our building was originally built to be the art building for the fair. 8:48 [SPEAKER_00]: There was no lower level, it came in on the outside. 8:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Those spaces that you were in upstairs, were hung, salon style, floor of the ceiling with art. 9:00 [SPEAKER_00]: And that's where it was for six months. 9:02 [SPEAKER_01]: I was still curious about the source of this special relationship between the city of Athens and the city of Nashville. 9:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Nashville called itself the Athens of the South. 9:14 [SPEAKER_00]: So this was building that represented that. 9:16 [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't have anything to do with a Greek population here. 9:19 [SPEAKER_00]: That's what usually what people think. 9:21 [SPEAKER_00]: But it was really more about the way the city saw itself. 9:25 [SPEAKER_00]: They had a public education system quite soon after the city was founded in the 1790s. 9:31 [SPEAKER_00]: There was Greek and Latin taught in the schools. 9:35 [SPEAKER_00]: There are, if you go down 10, there are many neoclassical buildings and buildings that kind of take their structure from Greek and Roman architecture, including our state capital, so this is really about how to see these odds of progressive. 9:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Democratic, all the things that they looked back to ancient Greece and thought were a significant part of that civilization. 9:59 [SPEAKER_00]: So that was why they chose the Parthenon. 10:01 [SPEAKER_00]: So again, this was the art building for the fair. 10:04 [SPEAKER_00]: The fair lasted about six months and it was a huge success. 10:08 [SPEAKER_00]: It was an economic success which a lot of the fairs weren't a lot of the fairs lost money, but our fair didn't our fair made money. 10:16 [SPEAKER_00]: And that the buildings came down 10:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Nashville loved this part and on and it stood here for about another 15 years slowly falling apart the pediments sculptures began to fall off we have pictures of the building with ivy growing up the columns and for some reason in the middle of the depression 10:39 [SPEAKER_00]: They decided that they were going to commit to rebuild. 10:43 [SPEAKER_00]: And so they pulled that, cladding off, they reinforced the columns with steel, and they put the concrete, which is now in the exterior of our building on. 10:55 [SPEAKER_00]: At that time, they also committed to building the upper level, the level where you were, to make it look like a reconstruction of the inside of the person on. 11:05 [SPEAKER_00]: And so that's really what you're in when you go into the building now. 11:09 [SPEAKER_00]: There wasn't an Athena there for a long time. 11:14 [SPEAKER_00]: There was a plan to 11:15 [SPEAKER_00]: meant to have one right from the very beginning, but they just ran out of money. 11:21 [SPEAKER_00]: There was a small little knockout, a plan for one, and she was up there for quite a long time. 11:26 [SPEAKER_01]: It was almost a hundred years after the construction of the Parthenon, that Athena finally made her appearance. 11:32 [SPEAKER_01]: In the early 90s, local architect and sculpture, Alan McQuire worked with scholars and artists to recreate the original statue. 11:41 [SPEAKER_00]: She was ungilded for many years and then in the early 2000s she was gilded. 11:46 [SPEAKER_00]: That was always the intent was for her to be painted and gilded, which the originally, the original with a pen. 11:53 [SPEAKER_01]: When she said gilded, or her means, 11:55 [SPEAKER_00]: She has covered with gold leaf, the original Athena, with have had gold plate on her. 12:02 [SPEAKER_00]: And that was a little bit outside the budget. 12:05 [SPEAKER_00]: So she has covered with a very gold leaf as like a tissue thin gold, and she has her whole gown. 12:14 [SPEAKER_00]: It's gold leaf, all raised by independent funding, not paid for by the city, but maintained by the city. 12:21 [SPEAKER_00]: But all paid for by donations. 12:23 [SPEAKER_01]: So was the original Parthenon just one floor? 12:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Yes. 12:27 [SPEAKER_00]: The antecedents of the lower level are murky, because there were stairs coming down, but I'm not sure what they came down to. 12:36 [SPEAKER_00]: And the building has had one significant renovation that was in 12:43 [SPEAKER_00]: I think the late 80s, so well before I was here, and that's what added the entrance home. 12:49 [SPEAKER_00]: During the fair, Nashville was visited by a businessman who was originally from Tennessee named James Cowen, and he was living in Illinois at the time. 12:58 [SPEAKER_00]: He came here to the fair in the 1890s. 13:01 [SPEAKER_00]: He had a really lovely time, and for some reason, he decided that he wanted to donate his art collection to the city. 13:10 [SPEAKER_00]: And so the Parthenon became the location for that. 13:13 [SPEAKER_00]: So when the building reopened in 1931, the upper level was the full-scale reproduction of the Parthenon, the lower level had some kind of gallery in it. 13:26 [SPEAKER_00]: And the galleries that you walk through, where there's a red carpet, are all part of that cow in collection. 13:33 [SPEAKER_00]: So it was like 62 paintings, 13:37 [SPEAKER_00]: mostly 19th and early 20th century paintings. 13:40 [SPEAKER_00]: So we've always had an art component to the museum. 13:46 [SPEAKER_01]: Was the parthenon renovated for the purpose of making it a permanent art museum? 13:51 [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think so. 13:52 [SPEAKER_00]: I think the idea was just to, we love our Parthenon by Goli. 13:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Let's make it bigger and better. 13:57 [SPEAKER_00]: And it was free. 13:57 [SPEAKER_00]: And by then, the land had become a public park. 14:01 [SPEAKER_00]: And that happened, I think, by 1904. 14:04 [SPEAKER_00]: If you ever had been down for a couple of years, say they bought the land, they began to develop it. 14:09 [SPEAKER_00]: It's a park. 14:10 [SPEAKER_00]: And, but it was not an art museum. 14:13 [SPEAKER_00]: I think it was only when Cowen decided that he was going to donate his collection of paintings to the city and they were trying to figure out the whereabouts that the Parthenon began to seem like a natural place for it. 14:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Does the city own the Parthenon? 14:28 [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, for part of the Metro Park's department. 14:32 [SPEAKER_01]: I asked if there were other buildings from the Nashville World's Fair that have survived. 14:37 [SPEAKER_00]: There's one other building that is now a private residence, and they moved it. 14:44 [SPEAKER_00]: It was a Masonic building of some kind. 14:47 [SPEAKER_00]: And it's really, it was like a very cool octagonal building. 14:51 [SPEAKER_00]: And it's, I think, it's down in Franklin now. 14:53 [SPEAKER_00]: It's a private poem that's the only one. 14:57 [SPEAKER_00]: The Parthenon was Nashville's building. 15:00 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things when you go back down the front, when you first come in, there's sort of a ramp area, and around the cases around that ramp, tell you the history of our own building, and there are pictures of the Tennessee Centennial. 15:16 [SPEAKER_00]: Other areas in Tennessee had buildings, Memphis had a pyramid, Knoxville had their building. 15:23 [SPEAKER_00]: This was Nashville's building, and it was the Parthenon because Nashville was then called the Athens of the South. 15:29 [SPEAKER_00]: So that was the connection between the two. 15:32 [SPEAKER_00]: It's a very 19th-century American idea about what the classical world was like. 15:37 [SPEAKER_00]: So, 15:38 [SPEAKER_00]: It's funny when people ask me about our connection to Greece, or are there a lot of Greeks and Nashville and is that why the Parthenon is here. 15:47 [SPEAKER_00]: To me, this is such an American building. 15:49 [SPEAKER_00]: This is such an American idea about where progressive, where democracy, we're looking backward at in a kind of an idealized way about the classical world, but we want to bring everything that we think was positive about that world into the future. 16:06 [SPEAKER_00]: And to me, that's what the Parthenon is. 16:09 [SPEAKER_01]: The Parthenon is one of those places that attract tourists, but it will always be more of a local institution. 16:16 [SPEAKER_01]: It's become something of an emblem for the city, and for Tennessee and across the state. 16:20 [SPEAKER_00]: It's very beloved. 16:22 [SPEAKER_00]: The park is, and the park is really well used, and we have between three and 400,000 visitors a year. 16:31 [SPEAKER_00]: We have lots and lots of school groups. 16:33 [SPEAKER_00]: We're part of, you know, Tennessee curriculum. 16:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Whenever kids are learning classical cultures, they come here, national history, they come here, mythology, and their English classes, they come here. 16:44 [SPEAKER_00]: And people get 16:46 [SPEAKER_00]: married here and get proposed to on the steps and people have great memories of the park and coming curious children and it feels very much like a beloved, beloved location in Nashville. 16:59 [SPEAKER_01]: After the statue of Athena, the first thing that grabbed your attention in this building is the giant set of bronze doors at the end of the building. 17:07 [SPEAKER_01]: They weigh 7.5 tons each and are 7 feet wide, 24 feet high, and 1 foot thick. 17:15 [SPEAKER_01]: I asked Lauren where they were made and how they were shipped here. 17:19 [SPEAKER_00]: But the doors are bronze, and they were made in New York and shipped here. 17:24 [SPEAKER_00]: The original doors were the doors for the original Parthenon, I should say, with a binwood. 17:30 [SPEAKER_00]: I think, but our doors are bronze and we're designed by the same sculptures that did the Pettiment sculptures. 17:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Belkini and her husband Leopold Schultz designed the doors they were sent here and constructed me as they are probably one of the largest of the large-scale bronze doors in the country. 17:50 [SPEAKER_00]: On the west side we do close them every night and so sometimes if I'm opening up in the morning, 17:56 [SPEAKER_00]: It's fun to open them up when people are out there because they're like, oh my gosh, you open up the doors. 18:05 [SPEAKER_01]: I mentioned to Lauren that the people who find the scale and size of the building off putting might be missing the point. 18:11 [SPEAKER_01]: Not only was it a building, made to house the life of the gods, who were presumably not small. 18:17 [SPEAKER_01]: The Parthenon was intended to inspire a sense of shock and awe in all who visited. 18:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I'm so glad you said that because that's what people say a lot about Athena is they find her too garrish. 18:29 [SPEAKER_00]: But first of all, you were never supposed to be like right up on her. 18:33 [SPEAKER_00]: You were just supposed to catch a glimpse of her and you should be shocked by her and it should fill you with awe. 18:38 [SPEAKER_00]: It should frighten you a little bit. 18:39 [SPEAKER_00]: I have seen kids like start crying, but I also saw this was the greatest with... 18:46 [SPEAKER_00]: a woman who was here with her daughter who was probably about six and she just went up and she curts eat like at the end of a ballet class. 18:54 [SPEAKER_00]: She just fell out like curts eat in the front of her and I just thought that was just so great. 19:01 [SPEAKER_00]: But yes, you're right. 19:02 [SPEAKER_00]: It shouldn't be, it shouldn't be like a cozy warm feeling up there. 19:06 [SPEAKER_00]: You should be feeling some some gravity there because she doesn't mess around. 19:12 [SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't just Athena, but all the other statues that were painted at the Parthenon. 19:17 [SPEAKER_01]: Even the structure itself would not have been white. 19:20 [SPEAKER_01]: Chemical engineers have discovered that the entire building, columns, and all was once painted bright shades of red, blue, and green. 19:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Polychrom or color sculpture is something that we are going to be looking at a little more closely in the next year, because a lot of people don't know that the original sculptures were painted, and if you think about the way you might imagine the Acropolis all glistening white, it didn't look quite like that, it would have been quite to our eyes quite boldly painted and patterned. 19:55 [SPEAKER_00]: So it's exciting to think about exploring that a little bit with people and creating a little bit of a mind-blowing opportunity for them as they search to think about that. 20:05 [SPEAKER_00]: Because we do have this example of a fully painted sculpture there, the original with a bengilded and painted as I said her eyes with a bin in set with jewel. 20:16 [SPEAKER_00]: She would have been quite bright. 20:19 [SPEAKER_00]: We will never paint ours, but we will explore it. 20:22 [SPEAKER_00]: We're looking into ideas about programming and letting people understand but the original might have looked like. 20:30 [SPEAKER_01]: I'd like to encourage you to stop and visit Nashville's Parthenon the next time you're in Tennessee. 20:36 [SPEAKER_01]: Remember, it's the only place you can see the statue of Athena that once sat inside the original temple.
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