The Stoa of Attalos was built in the 2nd century BC by Attalos II of Pergamon as a gift to Athens — a two-storey colonnaded commercial building on the eastern edge of the Ancient Agora. The stoa was destroyed by the Heruli in 267 AD and remained ruined until its reconstruction in the 1950s by the American School of Classical Studies, rebuilt in Pentelikon marble and Piraeus limestone using original fragments and ancient accounts. It now houses the Agora Museum. The reconstruction is sometimes criticised as too pristine, but it remains the clearest available impression of what an active Hellenistic public building actually looked like — the scale, the colour of the stone, the proportions of the columns in use. The museum inside is one of the quietest in Athens: the collection covers daily life in the ancient city, from ostraka (the clay shards used in the voting procedure that gave us the word ostracism) to bronze weights and clay lamps. Worth visiting before or after the Acropolis, when the attention turns from iconic ruins to architectural evidence.
Ancient Agora, Athens, Greece