Nashville Parthenon Museum
In front of the Nashville Parthenon is a colorful mosaic sphinx/dragon bench that the kids had a great time climbing on.
There are also bathrooms (to the left) and a gift shop (to the right) inside the museum, before you get to the ticket desk, so anyone can shop or use the bathroom. You only pay (it was $10 for adults, $8 for children 4-17) to go inside the museum.
The Nashville Parthenon was built in 1897 for the Tennessee Centenary Exposition and is a full-size replica of the original in Athens. Inside the museum they had little handouts you could pick up with activities for kids that included a word search and exercises you could do around the pillars outside as well as some simplified history. The museum includes a lot of great information on the Centenary Exposition itself as well as the construction of the Parthenon.
There’s a special exhibit up now that will hopefully become permanent called “We Have a Vision: Nashville Women from the Centennial to Suffrage” that has a lot of great old photos as well as stories about individual women from the area who were active in the suffrage movement.
It’s hard to believe that women have only been voting in the US for 100 years as of 2020. Well, white women, anyway. It took until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before black men and women could vote. My great-grandmother would have been in the first generation of women voters, but it’s something that my generation grew up taking for granted, and my kids even more so. My children’s children will take for granted not only that women and people of color can vote, but that they can lead.
The centerpiece of the Nashville Parthenon is the nearly 42-foot-tall statue of the Athena Parthenos.
The statue of the goddess Nike she holds in her hand is 6 feet, 4 inches, which is taller than most humans. The serpent next to her is 20 feet long.
The statue is more recent than the building itself and took eight years to construct, finally being unveiled in 1990. The original statue in Greece no longer exists, so this one was based on scholarship and archaeologic data and the ideas of the Nashville artist Alan LeQuire. While the original was made of ivory and cast gold on a wood frame, the Nashville Athena Parthenos is made of gypsum cement and fiberglass with 23.75 karat gold leaf and white paint on a steel frame. This huge and heavy statue is on the second floor of the museum, so the steel frame actually goes through the floor below and all the way down until it is anchored in the bedrock beneath the museum, which the kids found interesting.
The last piece of information I want to share about this museum is that it was featured in a very popular book/film that your children may have read: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. The exterior shots were all filmed here at the Parthenon, but the interior shots, where Percy, Annabeth, and Grover battle a hydra and retrieve a pearl from the Athena Parthenos statue are from a re-creation on a sound stage.
