Why Is There a Parthenon in Nashville?

In 1897, a plaster replica of the Parthenon built in Nashville for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition proved so popular that it was rebuilt in a more permanent form. Learn more about Nashville's Parthenon in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio,
Hey brain Stuff Lauren Vogelbaum here. At first, no one
expected the building to last. The Tennessee Centennial Exposition, which
was something like a World's Fair or Walt Disney World's Epcot,
was held in Nashville. In it featured a full scale

(00:24):
replica of the famous Parthenon from Greece, the Plaster Parthenon.
This plaster Parthenon, which fit in with Nashville's ambition to
be the Athens of the South, housed an art exhibition
overy six months. One point eight million people visited the exposition,
but small when compared with the twenty seven million who
turned out for the Chicago World's Fair of eight three

(00:46):
but huge for Nashville, which at the time had a
population of a hundred thousand. As a ninety one newspaper
put it, the general effect of the cream colored staff structure,
with the brilliant colors and the freeze and gables so
overshadowed all the other buildings that when the exposition was over,
the people demanded its preservation, and it became a shrine

(01:07):
to the residents and visitors of Nashville. But this shrine
was not built for the long term. By nineteen eighteen,
the building had disintegrated so badly that it had to
be closed for safety reasons. However, thanks to popular demand,
the city decided to rebuild it as a permanent concrete
structure in ninety The Nashville Parthenon reopened to the public

(01:28):
in ninety one. As with the Greek Parthenon, the columns
on the Nashville structure are not completely straight, but have
a slight convex curvature called enthesis that corrects for an
optical illusion that makes straight lines of peercung cave at
a distance. The structure is also full of friezes and carvings,
and includes a replica of the famous Elgin marbles, now

(01:51):
known as the Parthenon Marbles. These marble structures were part
of the original Parthenon, but were removed by the British
Earl of Elgin and sold to the British Museum m
in eighteen sixteen. The entire transaction remains a point of
dispute between Brittain and Greece, and while the original Parthenon
is in a ruin, the Nashville version features the complete

(02:11):
structure of builders made educated guesses to fill in the
missing parts. At the time of its reopening in nineteen
thirty one, the only thing missing from this replica Parthenon
was a statue of the Greek goddess Athena. But after
twenty years of small contributions from the public via a
donation box at the site, plus some private funding, there

(02:31):
was enough money to commission a forty two foot that's
thirteen meter statue, the same size as the original. Tennessee's
sculptor Alan Lechoir took eight years to finish the mass
of work, which was unveiled in nineteen nine and features
a spear that was crafted with McDonald's flagpole as the
sturdy core. For twelve years, the statue stood in plain

(02:51):
white gypsum cement, but in two thousand two it was
gilded in real gold. Although some people have complained that
the guilding makes it look gaudy, it's actually more historically accurate.
The Nashville Parthenon still serves as the city's art museum,
and its permanent collection is home to sixty three paintings
of nineteenth and twenties century American artists donated by Nashville

(03:12):
businessman and collector James Cowen. Today's episode was written by
Katherine Whitbourne and produced by Lowell Berlante and Tyler Clang.
For more on this and lots of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of
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(03:32):
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