Stoa of Attalos - Museum of the Ancient Agora

This guide to the Stoa of Attalos in Athens opens in the 1930s, when an entire neighborhood called Vrysaki, home to families who had lived there for generations, was cleared to expose the ancient marketplace buried beneath it, funded by an American oil heir who never set foot in Greece. It then goes back further, to the Pergamene king Attalos the Second, who studied philosophy in Athens under a teacher named Carneades and later built this long marble colonnade as a gift to the city. Raiders called the Heruli set its wooden roof ablaze in the third century, leaving it a ruin for centuries afterward.