The Acropolis (1:1 scale)

Minecraft Citadel by THSchutt (2024)

The history of western architecture largely begins with the Ancient Greeks, and the Acropolis of Athens is where I begin a journey, building the precursors that lead up to the great gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages.  Pericles, the foremost statesmen of ancient Athens, ushered in a Golden Age for the city-state, constructing many public works including the Parthenon atop the Acropolis citadel.  Multiple previous temples dedicated to Athena had existed on the rocky fortress before the Parthenon, but the Acropolis and its temples suffered significant destruction during the Persian Wars.  Once the Persians were defeated, to commemorate their victory and to establish their place as a major power, the Athenians built the Parthenon, one of the largest, most luxurious, and most technically impressive temples that had been built to date.

Building the Acropolis of Athens has been a long-term goal of mine for the last several years.  This build has been the largest and most challenging project I have tackled to date.  Cathedrals may be far more intricate, but they can be modeled with classical geometry and calculus whereas the natural landscape itself is part of Greek architecture.  I am far less experienced with building custom terrain, so this was a real growing experience for me, requiring me to utilize countless reference materials including topographical diagrams, 3D models, and aerial photos.  As is my signature style, my build is 1:1 in scale with its dimensions being quite close to the real thing.

DIMENSIONS: MODEL (blocks) vs. REAL (m)

Parthenon Length:   70 vs. 69.5

Parthenon Width:   34 vs. 30.9

Parthenon Colonnade Height:   11 vs. 10.4

Parthenon Total Height:   21 vs. 19

I first built an early version of the Parthenon in Minecraft back in 2012.  I was unsatisfied with the result because at the time I could not figure out how to get appropriately sized columns for a 1:1 scale build.  I had opted for columns with 1x1 bases which were clearly too thin, but the obvious alternative of 2x2 bases would have been far too thick.  Fortunately patch 1.16 in 2020 finally updated the mechanics of wall blocks which made stacked walls appear flush, eliminating any holes between them.  Therefore it became possible to use wall blocks configured in a 2x2 arrangement to produce columns that are approximately 1.6 blocks wide, which is a near perfect ratio when juxtaposed with the 2.4 block wide gap between adjacent columns.  I then replaced the texture for End Stone Bricks with Quartz Pillars in my custom resource pack to use for the columns.  The slightly recessed center of these 2x2 wall block columns is actually a boon stylistically, for it adds a very subtle suggestion of fluting for the column, blending nicely with the Quartz Pillar texture.

Of course, the columns of the Parthenon are not uniform in their diameter as they ascend from the stylobate to the entablature; they bulge slightly in their mid-section to visually emphasize how they are bearing a great load dynamically, counteracting undesirable optical effects that would otherwise make rows of columns appear thinner in their middle.  This style of shaping columns with slight bulges is called “entasis.”  I have seen some Minecrafters attempt to replicate entasis in the columns of their Greek temples by transitioning between full blocks, wall blocks, and even trapdoors.  Personally I feel that any transition from one block to the next is too jarring to replicate entasis—entasis is supposed to be so subtle that most people would never even notice it.  So my choice was to pick the most ideal width for the Parthenon’s columns that I could and to not attempt to replicate entasis.

The supremely advanced skill of the Ancient Greek stonemasons feels almost anachronistic with their timing in history.  Their achievements with highly refined techniques like entasis and other masonry techniques for manipulating optical effects are arguably more advanced that any stonework that was seen for the next thousand years.  The Greeks did not even use mortar; their stone joints were so precise that they could align their stone blocks completely flush against one other.  It is an irony that such impressive stonemasonry came from a civilization that had not yet invented the arch or the vault to span their temples—one wonders what they could have accomplished with both.  Rather, the Greeks were dependent upon simple post-and-lintel structures that were limited in how much space they could cover.  The Greeks knew tension could crack the “lintel” stone block that lies atop the pairs of “post” columns, so their columns had to be close together to minimize the tension stresses, yielding the famous colonnades that we associate Greek temples with to this day.

Since the Ancient Greeks did not have arches or vaults, their roofs and ceilings relied on wooden beams and trusses to cover the spaces within their temples.  Greek buildings could be shingled with either more wood, or ceramic tiles, or even in the Parthenon’s case: marble tiles, an ornate and expensive stone that was reserved for their most important buildings.

The quality of a roof design can make or break a build in Minecraft, and I too often see Minecrafters build amazing structures only to then slap on a simple roof haphazardly.  So many factors must be carefully considered—the pitch, the shapes, the texturing.  I am in love with 1:3 sloped roofs in Minecraft, which is created with a certain configuration of stairs and slabs.  I used this technique to build the Parthenon’s marble roof with Quartz stairs and slabs.  To give my Parthenon the look of having shingled marble tiles, I recessed alternating cross-sections of the roof, staggered one-block inward from the outward quartz shingles.  It is important to break up the horizontal lines in a Minecraft roof—vertical texturing alone is often not enough; actual vertical shapes must be used to break up the horizontal lines.  In my Parthenon’s case, by alternating literally every single cross section, I both break up the horizontal lines and give the roof the appearance of having shingled tiles.  This works for a variety of different sloped pitches, but I think it works especially well for 1:3 sloped roofs.

The majority of my Acropolis build was built in about nine months, from June 2023–March 2024.  I first built the citadel itself with all its buildings, and then afterwards I used a mixture of World Edit and basic creative mode tools to sculpt the great rock that the citadel sits upon.  The land that the real Acropolis rock sits upon is not flat but rather inclined, but I wanted the base of my mount to be flat to make copy-pasting the schematic into different worlds easy, so I chose to level out the bottom of the rock formation a bit.  The lower level structures like the Theater of Dionysus, the Odeon of Pericles, and the Odeon of Herodes Atticus were the last ones I built, although they took the longest since they were considerably more intricate than most of the buildings in the citadel itself.

My complete Acropolis build is a bit of an amalgamation of different time periods.  While my build is predominately Greek, I did include some Roman buildings like the Odeon of Herodes Atticus and the tiny Temple of Roma and Augustus, largely just because I think they are cool.  The Odeon of Herodes Atticus is traditionally shown with a wooden roof that completely covers it, however I went for the “cool” factor and chose to build mine with a roof that only covers the seats and not the stage.  After all, since so much of what we know about these buildings is just based on conjecture from their ruins, who can say definitively whether the wooden roof did or did not span the entire theater?

I also took some creative license with the grand stairway of the Propylaea, for the stairway went through many different alterations over its life—the Romans for example installed a zig-zagging path on the final stretch at the top, but this just looks weird in Minecraft, so I opted to keep the stair path straight which is closer to how the Ancient Greeks had originally built it anyway.  There is also some ambiguity as to just how far down the stairway should stretch to the bottom of the Acropolis rock, but again I used a little creative license to terminate it about halfway down the mount and then connect it with lesser roads.  This was necessary partiality since the ground that the real Acropolis rests upon is actually inclined and not clearly defined, so I had to make certain elements connect in a way that looks logical and aesthetically pleasing.

Perhaps the most notable creative choice I made was to not incorporate color into the statues of the tympanum, the friezes, and most of the ornate sculpture in general.  It has been a relatively recent revelation in modern times where we now know classical sculpture was typically painted with rich colors.  But our modern aesthetics have trained our brains to expect marble sculptures to be pristine, unpainted stone, as was done by renaissance artists who ironically thought they were mimicking classical art.  What can I say?  I too just prefer beautiful white stone, even if it is not fully accurate.  As a nod to the authentic rich colors that would have been on the statuary, the background of the tympanum of my Parthenon has a mixture of beautiful reds and blues, to subtly suggest there would have been ornately painted elements.

Once the build itself was complete, I then went through the process of wrecking a copy of it to create the modern-day ruined version.  My original pristine version is primarily Quartz blocks, representing the freshly quarried marble that the Parthenon and much of the Acropolis would have largely been built out of, whereas my ruined version is primarily made of Sandstone to represent how the marble aged over time.  This is actually a real effect—the ongoing Acropolis Restoration Project(s) has slowly reconstructed the Parthenon and other structures using the original blocks of marble whenever possible but also using new replacement marble when necessary.  The original marble is very yellow-ish whereas the new marble is very white.  The “Secrets of the Parthenon” 2008 NOVA documentary discusses how the white new marble will slowly age to match the yellow color of the original marble.  You can see bits of Quartz blocks sprinkled amidst the Sandstone to represent the new marble that has been installed in recent years for the restoration projects.  I purposely left out modern structures like the old Acropolis museum that sits just to the east of the Parthenon atop the citadel.

Finally after all the work on the pristine and ruined versions was complete, I spent another three months, April–June 2024 incorporating it into landscape of my single-player world.  I built several custom cypress tree forests and several custom lakes to surround it, to make the Acropolis naturally fit into its setting.  I even spent another few months copy-pasting a favorite mountain range of mine from another map seed into the far off distance of my single-player world along with another lone custom mountain created with WorldPainter.  This is another reason why I prefer 1:1 scale builds in Minecraft: I enjoy making them feel like they are a part of the world they are in.  I spent an inordinate amount of time messing with the Distant Horizons and Bobby mods to get them both to work in tandem with the Replay Mod for those breathtaking view distances in the YouTube video, emphasizing the immersiveness of my entire world.  To date, I have only ever released maps of my builds in isolation rather than my full single-player map, but one day when I am ready, I will enjoy sharing my world with everyone.  I hope all this has been worth the wait and will continue to be for my future projects.