The Parthenon is an interesting one. It was mostly intact until 1687. The Ottoman Empire controlled the city and was using it to store gunpowder. The city came under attack by the invading Venetian army, and the Turkish garrison withdrew to the Acropolis, at which point the structure was struck by mortar fire causing a massive explosion that killed 300 and destroyed the Parthenon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_the_Acropolis_(1687)

Resources. These constructions represent somewhat of a pinnacle of entire empires. So there is this vast foundation that is needed for any society to build stuff like this.

If a society expends 95% of their effort merely to give basic food and shelter to their populace, they won't have resources left over to build or maintain such structures. Apart from a few notable empires (and in historic times, it TOOK the resources of an empire), most of the time humanity could basically only get by.

So underlying these things are conquests, slavery, and much looting etc. Once an empire collapses, it basically cannot afford the resources.

This was mostly true until the Industrial Revolution when humanity started to use a lot of non-muscle based energy on demand (not like wind energy for sails, windmills etc). Think of it this way, until the mid 1800s the vast majority of humanity had to engage in agriculture and livestock rearing just to feed itself. Today, modern economies have less than 10% of their human population engaged in agriculture. This frees up a lot more resources to build and do stuff.

I don’t know if you’re American, but think about buildings like:

-Michigan Central Station, Detroit (abandoned for decades, with some revitalization in progress)

-Any abandoned mall (abandoned, future tbd)

-Astrodome, Houston (abandoned, future tbd)

and ask how they fell into a state of abandonment and disrepair despite the governments of the United States and every state and local government that have jurisdiction over these respective structures staying intact. These buildings became old, expensive to maintain/renovate, and outlived their economic usefulness.

Same thing with these older buildings. Why pay to keep up an old stadium or temple that nobody uses anyway?

Additionally, it’s important to note that the nation that built the Colosseum is not the same nation that is called Italy today. Rome fell around 476 AD along with a lot of the wealth and infrastructure to support something like the Colosseum. Italy wasn’t reunited as a single nation until 1861. Rome didn’t surpass its ancient population until after WWII.

These two examples have pretty specific causes. u/bastardlyann mentioned the Parthenon’s being blown up in the Morean War.

The Colosseum’s a bit different. It had little purpose after the fall of the Empire—it could have comforably held medieval Rome’s entire population twice over. As a building robbed of its purpose, it not only was too much to maintain, but it was a great source of materials. Many of the iron clamps that had held its stones together were pried out and melted down. The marble façade and travertine core—especially where had already fallen down in earthquakes—was effectively re-quarried, as it was much easier to obtain and closer to hand than anything from a quarry. Some of it was used in the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in the 16th century. Some of it was just burned to make quicklime (useful in making steel and cement).

Contrast this to the Pantheon, Rome’s oldest standing building, which was repurposed into a church in the 600s. Or the Castel St Angelo, originally the tomb of Hadrian but rebuilt into the main fortress defending the Vatican. Neither building survives exactly as a late Imperial citizen would have seen them, but nor are they ramshackle ruins. These buildings (and there are many other examples, like the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, or the Cathedral of Syracuse in Sicily) have managed to remain useful to their city’s inhabitants for many, many centuries, in different forms and with different uses. (You’ll note that religious buildings tend to do well with this; the Parthenon was also used as a church for many centuries.)

Buildings that aren’t adaptable—like the medieval walls of many European cities, or indeed many of the shopping malls of 1960s America—tend to just be viewed as in the way (or a source of materials for new building) and often get cleared away.

Nope, they didn't exist for the entire time. Greece was missing from the map for centuries; at first, it was a part of the Eastern Roman Empire (though a core part), then a part of the Ottoman Empire (an oppressed colony). Italy was split into disparate city states for the entirety of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The city of Rome was held by the powerful Papal State (a much larger predecessor to modern day Vatican), but it was not interested in preserving "pagan" monuments (the same could be said about the Eastern Roman Empire).

The Colosseum has been under control of many different people and used for many different purposes. Each change resulted in modifications (ie the wooden seats were all removed to be used as barricades when people started using it as a fortress instead of a stadium).

A lot of the building has fallen down due to earth quakes. Some of which are quite recent. There's markers around the outside that show where the REAL outer walls should be. It used to be a lot bigger.

Importance, take Greece for example temples to the Greek Gods fell into disuse when Greek Orthodox Church became the main religion and therefore that church wanted the money from worshippers to build its own places of worship and would discourage belief in what went before. This allowed older religions structures to fall into disrepair (much like the in the uk when monasteries were dissolved by Henry VIII) helped to highlight they were failed institutions.

However it’s worth noting that in Italy and Greece there is evidence in history that earthquakes led to much of the initial damage leading to the buildings being unsafe and too expensive to repair and from there the time weather and deconstruction did the rest. obviously really tall structures still standing are much harder to steal stone from than the bits that have collapsed which is why some bits still stand and some bits are gone completely. We must remember though that some of what we see today in the colosseum is due to reconstruction works done over the last hundred years.

Buildings like the colosseum in Rome once damaged simply fell out of use because they had no further use, they were to big to take down and it was easier to let them decay. The once flooded and abandoned parts of New Orleans or the car factories in Detroit are chilling reminders that abandonment is something that even happens today.

All of these examples and places like the great pyramids are structures that fell out of use and much of their decay following their abandonment was because local people used them as sources of building materials almost like a quarry only the stones were already cut and piled up.

Remember with many of these old buildings disuse allowed soil/sand to build up and structures slowly being lost under the ground and out of sight. much of the ancient Roman architecture we see in Rome today was only “rediscovered” through excavation in the 18th/19th centuries.

Many ancient "pagan" structures were treated by subsequent (Christian) generations as quarries. The Giza pyramids were finished of in gleaming white limestone it was entirely stripped off.

The Temple of Artemis at the ancient city of Ephesus, had much of it's marble cladding removed and used in Churches.

It's important to note that the Parthenon didn't degrade slowly over time, and crumbled out of neglect. It was actively blown up. OK it might have been already degraded when it was blown up, but it was still a structure intact enough to store munitions. Then the Venetians lobbed a bomb that ignited the munitions and Kaboom... no more Parthenon.

Today it's parts are being cataloged and when possible, reassembled. SOME of the parts are in museums around the world, so to fully reassemble the parts would require taking them out of museums and placing them back into unprotected open air... an untenable idea for museums, or would require manufacturing new replica parts, which has been done in a few cases.

Other have already made some good points, the difficulty or resource poverty to repair damaged buildings, and cultural changes that meant some buildings suddenly become undesirable.

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At which point they have often been converted into a five fingered discount quarry.

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They have been very, very vulnerable to resource looting. Sometimes for ordinary buildings, sometimes for other monuments and other religious buildings.

Often new churches were built on the same site as the former temples, renovating or reusing older parts of the structures.

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Some were also used as churches without much adaptation, like the Pantheon, which is still to this day an active church. Though a pope did mug it during the 17th century and absconded with a lot of bronze and marble to build the Barberini Palace.

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In the eastern part of the roman empire (byzantine empire) many temples and shrines were demolished by decree and reused to build new churches.

A church in Hagios Kosmas used stones and columns from a shrine to Aphrodite. As far as researchers can tell just about every bit of that shrine is gone and more or less recycled into various structures, some which are also long gone by now.

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Quite a bit of the Colosseum that had been damaged by earthquakes and then some was carted off to build medieval and renaissance Rome, until a pope in 1744 put his slipper down and banned the practice as well as declaring it a protected site that could not be demolished. Parts of it is in Barberini Palace, Piazza Venezia and St. Peter's.

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You can find stones from a building dedicated to Ramses II (Died 1213 BC) used miles and miles away from it's original place to build the gateway for Shoshenq III (Died 798 BC).

For when you still wants that glorious builder prestige but haven't quite got the same budget. In that case Ramses was from a very different family and time, but Shoseng III wasn't averse to taking from his direct ancestors either.

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Recycled sarcophaguses too. Some previous occupants might have been dumped who knows where, and some found themselves reinterred in less fancy environments with new roommates.

And some dispensed with relocating entirely and just cleared out the previous incumbent, relabeled stuff and moved in after death.

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If people ever wonder why we don't know where more pharaohs, their relatives and other dignitaries mummies are and who's whom, this is also one of the reasons. You can't even trust these people to stay in their own graves.

The same reason why any building falls into disrepair over time. Funds and manpower are allocated to newer building projects or government officials don’t think they’re worth it.

We value these ancient things more now as they are older and we live in a world of relative abundance so we can give a crap about such things. Most ancient structures have suffered from locals repurposing the materials for whatever else. It might be more relevant for a structure to last long if people arent around to fuck it up, thinking about south american temples, Macchu Picchu, Ankor Wat.

This is a big question with multiple answers. I am a history undergrad with a focus on ancient architecture. I'll share a little bit from what I've learned in my classes.

1. Some of these historic sites get totally buried. With the volatile geology of places like Greece the earthquakes that they have and the degree of erosion that they experience off of their mountains and hillsides, huge buildings can be entirely swallowed up. For example, the Athenian Agora was almost entirely buried until about 1930. The only structure that was still visible was the a single temple ( I'll come back to that in a minute). The rest of it had been literally buried from erosion. On top of that burial there were people that had constructed homes and they were compensated and removed by the Athenian and Greek governments in the '30s that way the American schools of architecture could come and excavate the original agora.

2. They often get repurposed. The structures that wind up standing, like the Hephesteon in the Athenian Agora, do so because they were maintained or taken over by church usually. These are incredible structures that were built to impress and intimidate when they were constructed and they still serve that purpose thousands of years later. The Greek Orthodox Church used it as a cathedral for an extended period of time, I don't actually know how long, but it's the Greek government has gotten involved in the archaeological societies have become more involved It has been restored.

Another way of repurposing an ancient building is to go and take stone out of an original building and use it for whatever it is that you are building. This is really common at archaeological sites that are near small towns or cities where gaining resources might be difficult. If you're a farmer building a stone wall and you have a theater nearby where nobody ever goes, it seems practical to go and just take one of the stones that are there and use them in your wall. This is really common throughout the ancient world and people recover random pieces of text and stole (stones that have engravings on them) all the time in really weird places. What's cool is that if it's done carefully then it can sometimes be one of the best ways to preserve a stole.

3. Resources are not always available. And some other redditors have pointed out, when a major powerful government like the Athenian League or the Roman Empire collapses the resources become less available because they take colonial holdings in order to keep in order. Without those colonial holdings it gets much more difficult. There's also a time and focus issue, It takes a long time to maintain and reconstruct some of these buildings and if no one really cares to do it then they just fall into disrepair. Especially considering the ubiquity of limestone, and how limestone reacts with acid rain, sometimes this can happen really quickly.

4. Some of the disrepair is intentional. Some of these buildings fell apart a long time ago through events like earthquakes for example. That earthquake destroying the building imparts its own history into that building. And if an archaeological team goes out and only puts up four or five columns it gives enough, visually, to reconstruct the rest of the building on paper. And really that is what is the intent. They leave them knocked down because to restore them exactly as they used to be, would be incredibly expensive and it kind of takes away from some of that history.

I don't know if that was e l i5 enough, but I really care about it and it's hard to talk about it in other terms.

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For the same reason the US infrastructure is falling apart: the funds to maintain the constructions are no longer made available.

Many of these places are zones of historical conflict and that is a cause. Rome defeats Carthage and tears the place down, that in ancient times. Several sieges in documented historical times cause much damage to the Parthenon, and other sites.

In the town of Xanten, Germany, there's an "archaeological park" (Archäologischer Park Xanten) at an old Roman fort. Most of what's left are stone columns and foundations that had minimal restoration to keep them from falling apart further, but they rebuilt much of the town as a great educational attraction. It's also my understanding that many of the great stone edifices were, upon the fall of their empires, pillaged for building materials and road paving. The Goths didn't really have historic preservation on their list of priorities.

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Another example is the Sphinx, which had it's nose until Napoleon's troops used it for target practice.

The Greek and Roman empires most certainly have not existed the entire time, and you're talking about extremely long timelines. Even if there was a sitting Roman emperor for the past 2500 years and the entire period had not seen a single invasion succeed, you're talking about a maximum 50 year reign for each emperor. That's 50 lifetimes. Now consider that many rulers during that period only lasted a few months and you might start to see the problem.

Try to find a building in New York City that's older than 100 years. Most of them just get torn down for being old and decrepit, and that's with our current engineering technology, using machines and materials that could never have existed in ancient times. Throw in regular earthquakes and other natural disasters that cause further damage.

Thats pretty much what happened to the Roman Colluseum. Several political leaders considered it a ruin worth only it's scrap materials, and used that stone for other building projects to save money. It certainly wasn't usable for its original purpose even 1500 years ago.

Since people have answered the other part well I'll try to explain the second part of the question. No Greece and Italy did not exist the entire time. Athens home of the Parthenon was a city state which ended up conquered numerous times the Macedonians, the Romans, the Byzantines (Eastern half of the roman empire after a split), the Ottomans all ruled or conquered the city at points. With the parthenon being partially destroyed while under Ottoman by an attack from the city state of Venice. Which is a nice transition to the fall of Rome. Rome was invaded several times even nearly being abandoned when the aquaducts (the cities water supply was cutoff). The Colosseum was damaged by earthquakes and fire with the Romans not repairing it due to their situation. The Roman empire eventually ended up with small regional powers like the city state of venice. Rome for much of this time was ruled by the Pope as part of the Papel States. There is a bit more, but basically no Greece, and Italy/Rome did not exist the entire time.

Ever looked into what the Amphitheatrum Flavium was originally made of? What it would take to replace all that was torn down to burn in order to make quicklime? Sadly, not happening.

I used to always think that it would be better to not restore it because if we did, it would lose that ancient feeling. I saw it as if we repaired an old painting; it’d have been touched by the modern world instead of being left alone as a time capsule from the past.

YES why not make them like new and like...use the colosseum as a giant museum or something? Or a community center?

There's a nice Parthenon in Nashville, TN that looks practically new!

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https://www.nashville.gov/departments/parks/parthenon

Why are so many glorious buildings of our time abandoned to decay and ruin?

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Because maintaining massive stone structures is expensive, and often nobody owns these buildings, and lacks the means to make the upkeep a paying proposition. When times are bad, and money scarce, people's romantic attachment to history very quickly goes by the board.

For the Colosseum (Flavian Amphitheater) and many other structures it was because the buildings were no longer necessary, and the materials used in their construction could be better used elsewhere. Many cathedrals and other public works were created using the stones of ancient buildings. If you look closely at the Colosseum, you'll see thousands of little holes. These are from people who harvested the iron clamps the Romans used to hold bricks together.

I had the same question about concentration camps. Then I had a chance to visit Dachau during the MLK holiday as I went to Germany for a Nato conference, but due to the holiday me and my DET SGT and I had a whole day to ourselves. So we went.

Dachau, after WWII ended, was used as a refugee camp. We bombed the absolute shit out of Germany during WWII, and most of the populace was experiencing disease and famine (hence why so many camp prisoners died. The Germans literally couldn't feed their own citizens.) So after the Marshall plan rebuilt West Germany, their primary focus was on rebuilding their military. This is in the 1960s/70s, so the big fear was the Soviet Union pouring tank divisions into West Germany. So they neglected it.

Today, the camp is a mostly recreation of what it was like. The original buildings are long gone. They've built reproductions, but everyone back in 1946 had bigger concerns then preserving a camp. I get it now.

So for the answer to why did the Parthenon fall into disrepair, I bet they had bigger problems to deal with.

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Three things really.

First, these buildings just happened to be built in areas where it is both easy and desirable to build things, which means if you want to build something better or more efficient, you have to remove the old buildings. That decrepit temple dedicated to a god you don't worship anymore is fair game when you need to build administrative offices or a new palace.

Second, maintenance becomes a problem. It might cost more to maintain a building than than the people who surround the area can afford. Moreover, natural disasters happen, large earthquakes tended to be hell on these large stone and brick buildings. Once the roof caves in or the walls fall, the cost of rebuilding would be absolutely not worth it, doubly if you're interested in rebuilding it to the original specifications.

Third, the building material were valuable. If an earthquake knocked the walls down there was little interest on just holding on to those pieces of what is now rubble, the owner might sell it off or people might just come and take the stones and bricks for use in other construction. Sometimes it happens because of normal decay of society, war might come and the government might flee, people will start picking apart the buildings to rebuild their houses because no one is there to stop them. Speaking of war, the material used also happens to be useful for things like walls and fortifications. Military leaders found it easier to use locally sourced material from existing and often decaying buildings than to get their own through a quarry or making their own bricks.

Last, as culturally valuable objects, invaders often would raze these sites to punish a population for resisting or to eliminate their culture. In the 19th and 20th century as artillery and later aerial bombing became more powerful though somewhat inaccurate, things just happened to get hit, or defenders used them for storage of war supplies which made them a target (the Parthenon). Related to that some culturally significant objects were military fortifications and buildings that were destroyed in the normal events of war. Large extravagant gates and walls would have been legitimate targets for destruction, and once captured it was sometimes prudent to eliminate these walls and structures so they couldn't be reused as to deny the enemy their future use. In many cases they were rebuilt but they were often rebuilt in ways that didn't resemble the original, because warfare changes and the design of walls and buildings also have to change. So it wouldn't make sense to restore it and it's original way.

Furthermore sometimes buildings are used and modified throughout their history, which begs the question what point of history do you restore that building to? It's absolute original? Or maybe the way it looked at a key point in history? Or maybe restoring it to a point where we absolutely know what it looked like? Any one of those choices destroys one history to preserve another. It's not something we can decide.

One of the larger issues is it is difficult to repair something made with ancient techniques in a way that does not make it blatantly obvious it has been modified.

For example it was only recently discovered that what was thought to be a case of poor quality control in Roman mortar was actually intentional and allowed structures to effectively "heal" when their concrete cracked.

As a result, you almost have to go back to ancient techniques to make a repair or improvement that looks the same, and its as simple as the fact that a hand-sawn board looks considerably different than a machine sawed piece of wood...which means in the end...its going to be really expensive.

The colosseum was largely intact until the 14th century when an earthquake knocked down the southern side of it. Rather than rebuild it, everyone was basically "hey, free building materials"

Depends on the structure.

The Parthenon was actually fine up until the 17th/18th century. It got blown up because it was used to store gunpowder during a war.

The Colosseum got destroyed by an earthquake around the year 700. But by that time, the thing wasn't really used for anything anymore, and repairs would require a lot of money and resources that nobody wanted to contribute.... Because it had no used

The big thing to keep in mind is that the main reason these things are awe-inspiring is because they were so massive, and expensive to build. Most countries don't wanna pour billions or trillions of dollars into buildings what solely amount to tourist attractions. The colosseum is basically just a magnet to get foreigners to buy hats at this point.

Especially since the materials used to build them could go towards more practical uses, there's just not any good reason. They're expensive, and currently culturally irrelevant. (Italy isn't Rome. Modern Greece isn't ancient Greece)

Greece especially isn't in an economic state to make that decision. Most countries have other problems to tend to

In Rome the old buildings served as quarries for later buildings- especially Imperial buildings were demolished in the resources-starved medieval period. From the earliest period of Christianity in the Roman empire, the collapse of support for pagan religions meant the temples were neglected and started being pillaged for their decorative stone especially - the bulk of the coloured marble in Roman churches dates from imperial Rome (in the older churches in Rome, most of their often mismatched columns have been taken from older pagan temples) Ever noticed a lot of churches have large disks of coloured stone set into the floor or walls - sections sawn from pagan Roman columns. Marble was burnt to make lime for mortar. We know this was an on-going problem as the authorities from the 4th century onwards kept writing new laws to stop it from happening, as previous laws were clearly not working. So the ravages of time which brought the buildings of imperial Rome low had two legs & hammers, chisels and wheel barrows.

A few buildings were protected as holy sites - the Colosseum survived reasonably intact for a long time as it was a martyrs' shrine, but in the 15th century special permission was given by a Pope to his nephew to take a lot of stone from it to build the ginormous Palazzo della Cancelleria.

Moving large blocks of stone, especially on land, is really difficult in a pre-modern period. Most of the best marbles in Rome came from Asia Minor by boat in the Roman period. Once there was no longer the infrastructure - or the slaves - to move stone, people just grabbed it from the nearest empty building, the temple of whatever. Lots of the older, medieval buildings in the ghetto in Rome have architraves, bits of columns or statues embedded in them, and are probably built with stone & lime & rubble hacked from older imperial Roman structures.

Even Bernini's Four Rivers fountain in Piazza Novanta "re-uses" (that's the correct technical term) travertine blocks from the Roman Circus that used to occupy the site (you can see an excavated space at the North end of the piazza that has a section of the original Roman structure about 4m below current ground level)

It's a fascinating & complicated subject. Some buildings in the center of Rome incorporate stone from all major periods of history: medieval base with inserted Roman decoration, next floor a Renaissance logia, then Baroque window frames, all topped by an illegal 1970s cement terrace.

I would argue people did not value historical monuments the same way we are valuing them now. When I grew up Beijing, there’s quite a few 四合院, which is basically a house with 4 sides and a central courtyard. People abandoned those to live in new modern buildings.

Now, some of those are worth up to hundreds of millions of dollars due to historic value.

I have visited the Colosseum twice. Remember these places were built with slave labor originally. The tour guides say that during wars and the dark ages, there was no money. People were poor. The country was poor at times. They used the Colosseum as shelter and stole various metals from the structure. During times of prosperity, restoration efforts have been made including modern times. It’s expensive and time consuming. But the restoration is progressing.

So there are a few possible reasons. Some buildings fell out of use because they built newer more modern buildings.

Some buildings were for religious purposes. So as people moved away from the ancient religions these buildings didn't serve much of a purpose.

Buildings were also subject to environmental destruction such as earthquakes, erosion, etc. A major earthquake is the reason why part of the one side is missing in the Colosseum.

But probably the biggest reason is that they were made out of useful or valuable resources like marble and iron. It was common for builders to take parts of buildings and in corporate them into new buildings to cut down on cost for construction of the new building. Take the Colosseum in Rome for instance. The Colosseum was partly made out of marble and most of its marble was taken and used in the construction of St Peter's Basilica and possibly used for private residences of the wealthy. Also with the Colosseum theives would drill holes into the building to steal the iron.

However if a building was repurposed for another use then the building would be frequently maintained. Take for instance the Pantheon in Rome. It's one of the best preserved ancient Roman building. In the early 600s AD the former Roman temple was converted to a Catholic church. As a result it was maintained and perserved.

They stole blocks from the colesium to make new buildings. Homeless people were living in the colesium. I remember that from the tour anyways