In 1687 a Venetian cannonball punched through the roof of the Parthenon and ignited the gunpowder the Ottomans had stored inside, killing 300 people and scattering two millennia of marble carving across the Acropolis. But the real controversy in this episode is what happened next: how roughly half of the surviving sculptures were sawn off, shipped to London and became the center of a geopolitical standoff that is still raging today.

We describe the pediments, metopes and frieze designed under Phidias, the centuries of reuse as church and mosque, the locals burning marble in lime kilns, and the arrival of Lord Elgin in 1798 with a plan to sketch that escalated into dismantling. We scrutinize the missing Ottoman firman that survives only as a translation of a translation, the bribes that kept scaffolding up, the sinking of the brig Mentor and ...