In 1687 a Venetian cannonball punched through the roof of the Parthenon and ignited the gunpowder the Ottomans had stored inside, killing 300 people and scattering two millennia of marble carving across the Acropolis. But the real controversy in this episode is what happened next: how roughly half of the surviving sculptures were sawn off, shipped to London and became the center of a geopolitical standoff that is still raging today.

We describe the pediments, metopes and frieze designed under Phidias, the centuries of reuse as church and mosque, the locals burning marble in lime kilns, and the arrival of Lord Elgin in 1798 with a plan to sketch that escalated into dismantling. We scrutinize the missing Ottoman firman that survives only as a translation of a translation, the bribes that kept scaffolding up, the sinking of the brig Mentor and the sponge divers who salvaged the crates, Elgin’s bankruptcy and the 1816 sale to Parliament, Lord Byron’s public campaign against him, and the 1930s scouring with copper chisels and carborundum that stripped the marble’s honey patina. We finish with a neutral account of the Greek and British positions, including the Acropolis Museum and the British Museum Act of 1963.

• Why a defending army stored explosives inside an ancient temple, and what Morosini’s snapped ropes destroyed
• Pieces of stone with old inscriptions and figures: the ambiguous phrase at the heart of a two-century legal debate
• Baksheesh, Ottoman bureaucracy and the argument that the state ultimately ratified the removal
• Lord Duveen’s demand for gleaming white marble and the unauthorized cleaning that erased ancient tool marks
• Organic unity versus the universal museum: the arguments on both sides of the stalemate