Conclusion: The City on a Hill

The conclusion summarises the main characteristics of the physical topography of Athens and Jerusalem—as well as the role the two cities played in the imagination of the Mediterranean world—during the Middle Ages. It reviews the ways in which contact and exchange between the rival superpowers of the Egyptian Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire not only influenced art, architecture, and textual production, but also radically transformed the religious beliefs, devotional practices, and political discourses of the Fatimid and Macedonian dynasties and their successors from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. Finally, it discusses the gradual process by which the cultural and ideological underpinnings of mediaeval society were subsequently erased and forgotten. It does so by outlining the shifts in the perception of the Athenian Parthenon and of the Acropolis more generally, that can be deduced from the testimony provided by travellers and antiquarians (e.g. Cyriaco da Ancona, Evliya Çelebi) from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, by the organisers of scientific campaigns of archaeological excavation and conservation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (e.g. Ludwig Ross, Kyriakos Pittakis, Leo van Klenze), and by today’s Ministry of Tourism.