Athens takes its name, in the Greek telling, from a contest between Athena and Poseidon for patronage of the city. Poseidon struck the Acropolis rock with his trident and produced a spring of seawater; Athena planted an olive tree, and the citizens, judged by their king Cecrops, chose her gift as the more useful. The olive and the owl became her enduring emblems, and the Erechtheion, an asymmetrical temple on the Acropolis's north side, was built around the spot where the contest was remembered to have happened, sheltering both the sacred olive and the mark of the trident.
The Acropolis's dominant building is the Parthenon, raised between 447 and 432 BCE under the statesman Pericles as the temple of Athena Parthenos, "the virgin," housing Phidias's lost chryselephantine cult statue of the goddess in full armor. Every fourth summer, the Great Panathenaia carried a newly woven robe, the peplos, up from the city below to reclothe an older, more sacred olive wood image of Athena Polias kept in the Erechtheion, a procession carved into the Parthenon's own frieze. The temple's religious life did not end with paganism: it became a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary by the sixth century CE, a mosque under Ottoman rule from the 1460s, and a powder magazine that a Venetian mortar detonated in 1687, the explosion that left the ruin visible today.