The Morean War was one of those late-seventeenth-century European conflicts that everyone has heard the consequences of and almost no one remembers by name. Venice and the Holy League had pushed back the Ottoman tide after the failed Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, and by 1687 Venetian forces had taken the Peloponnese and were pressing northward into central Greece. The Venetian position was insecure; the Ottoman strongholds at Thebes and Negroponte sat ready to invade the peninsula again. Athens, garrisoned by Ottoman troops who had held the city for two centuries, became the next target. On 21 September 1687, a Saxon-led Venetian army of about 10,750 men landed at Eleusis. The Turks abandoned the lower town immediately, withdrew up the rock, and prepared to wait out the siege from inside the Acropolis.

The Venetians dragged their cannon and mortars onto the Pnyx, the limestone hill where Pericles had once spoken to the assembled Athenians, and onto Philopappos Hill where a Roman-era tomb still stands. The Ottomans on the rock answered as they could. They demolished the small temple of Athena Nike at the western entrance to clear sight lines for a cannon battery, fired through the columns of the Propylaea, and dug in among the marble. On 25 September a Venetian shell exploded a powder magazine inside the Propylaea. The next evening, the magazine inside the Parthenon went up. The blast was visible from the harbour. The roof timbers, the marble blocks, and the people sheltering inside came down together. What followed was less a battle than a slow accounting of what had been lost.

The Ottoman garrison kept fighting after the explosion, but a relief column from Thebes was repulsed on 28 September and the survivors capitulated the following day. Their terms were modest: safe passage to Smyrna for those who wanted to leave. The Venetians took possession of an Acropolis that no longer had its central monument intact. Morosini, in the kind of decision that has made him an unloved figure in Greek memory ever since, ordered that the western pediment of the Parthenon be dismantled so its sculptures could be carried back to Venice as trophies. The lifting tackle slipped. The statues of Poseidon and the chariot of Nike fell and shattered on the rock. The Venetians abandoned the attempt and contented themselves with marble lions, including the great Piraeus Lion that still stands at the gate of the Venetian Arsenal.

Holding the city proved impossible. Ottoman cavalry from Thebes ranged the countryside, the plague returned that winter, and 1,400 Hannoverian mercenaries went home in late December. On 31 December a Venetian council voted to abandon Athens. As the preparations to leave became visible, the Athenians who had welcomed the Venetians made the calculation every civilian under occupation has to make at some point: to stay was to face Ottoman reprisal, to leave was to abandon home. About 622 families, perhaps five thousand people, took ship with the retreating Venetians and were resettled as colonists in Argolis, Corinthia, Patras, and the Aegean islands. On 10 April 1688 the last Venetian ship left Attica. The Ottomans returned and rebuilt a small mosque inside the broken Parthenon. It would stand there until Greek independence.

The Parthenon had survived earthquake, neglect, conversion to a church, conversion to a mosque, and the entire weight of late-antique forgetting. It survived the Crusader sack of Constantinople and the slow erosion of empire. It did not survive a single mortar shell fired from a hill where Pericles's grandfather might have walked. Every photograph of the temple as we know it today, missing its roof and most of its pediments, shows the shape Morosini's miraculous shot left behind. Lord Elgin's removals more than a century later took what remained of the figured sculpture to London. The siege of 1687 is the moment when the building stopped being a building and became a ruin, and from that ruin the modern idea of the Greek heritage was assembled. We mourn what we lost. We also notice that we know exactly when, and by whom, and why.