sparkspin

Oh, What a Lovely Finish...

(a little artistic license here; the Parthenon is built of white marble)

Not being widely travelled and at the same time maybe being a little slow on the uptake, I did find something inexplicable upon a visit to the Parthenon a couple of years ago.

Greece is not the most geologically stable country in the world and the tour guide told us that there had been some recent earth tremors.

Climbing the steps to the Acropolis, one was able to lean over the security rope and touch the mating surfaces of two sections of a column that had been displaced sideways a few centimeters by the recent seismic activity...

7 Pillars of something or other - more artistic license.

Thousands of years of weathering and recent acid rain have taken their toll upon the surfaces of the building materials...

One naturally comes to associate the texture of such artifacts with that of rough concrete. The freshly exposed flush mating faces of these column sections though, were polished to a mirror finish...

Now, call me thick, or what(?) but it occurs to me that if these surfaces, which were never destined to be seen, were given that high degree of surface polish, then it seems probable that the rest of the structure (that which was meant to be seen) would most likely have been given that self same treatment; but ~ those surfaces are a horrendously complex matrix of fluting & non-linear tapered carving. Plastics fabricators I know tell me it's virtually impossible to replicate these flutings in a mould. Erm,...

Materials? How? What?

Now you are going to tell me that the way they polished the marble was by a slow progression through the application of grinding sands, working down from coarse carving with bronze and iron tools to ever finer grades of grit. Do me a favour.

I don't buy it