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Athens was already a significant Mycenaean center by the 13th century BC, organized around a fortified acropolis that served as both a wartime refuge and a royal residence. A cyclopean wall from this period still survives behind the Propylaea's southern wall. The hill's summit held a palace and a place of worship dedicated to the goddess of a nearby spring -- a cult that, over time, became identified with Athena herself.
During the Archaic period the Acropolis shifted from a political stronghold into a dedicated place of worship. Its first monumental temple to Athena dates to the 6th century BC, rebuilt and enlarged under Solon and later decorated under Pisistratus. An early "Old Parthenon," begun perhaps after the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, was burned by the Persians in 480 BC before it was finished. The rebuilding that followed, under Pericles starting around 450 BC and funded by the tribute of Athens's allied cities, produced the Acropolis largely as it's recognized today -- construction continued through the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) without ever fully stopping. Centuries later, the Parthenon itself changed hands repeatedly: an Orthodox church under Byzantine rule, a Catholic church after 1205, a mosque following the Ottoman conquest, and finally a gunpowder store that the Venetians detonated during an 1687 siege, destroying much of its roof and interior.
Pericles conceived the Acropolis's full rebuilding as a single, unified project, and appointed the sculptor Phidias as its master builder, overseeing the architects, painters, and masons who executed it. In the 19th century, Lord Elgin, Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, removed most of the Parthenon's surviving marble friezes and sculptures and shipped them to England, where they remain on display in the British Museum -- a removal Greece has formally sought the return of for decades.
The Acropolis's religious identity shifted repeatedly with each new ruling power -- Greek temple, Byzantine church, Catholic cathedral, Ottoman mosque -- each leaving its own trace on structures already many centuries old by the time they arrived. Since Greek independence in 1833, the site has been continuously in Greek hands except for the World War II Nazi occupation, and has been reclaimed as the defining symbol of Greek national identity rather than any one era's religious monument.
The Acropolis became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, and the Greek government, with European Union funding, continues an ongoing restoration program aimed at stabilizing and, where possible, reversing centuries of war damage, pollution, and earlier well-intentioned but harmful 20th-century repairs. It remains Greece's single most-visited archaeological site.