The second-century ad Greek traveller Pausanias, himself extremely interested in matters of religion, praised the Athenians for their piety (Description of Greece 1.17.1). The special piety of the Athenians has long been thought to be a pagan phenomenon – the obsession of a world possessed of trinkets ‘like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art or man's device’ (Acts xvii.29) which appealed to a populace deaf even to the preaching of Paul (Acts xvii.15–34). No one, in short, has been much bothered with the religion of medieval Athens. In his major new book, Anthony Kaldellis has radically reversed the traditional picture of post-ancient Athens – assiduously ferreting out and adducing a pile of evidence (some of it very tenuous and fragmentary, some perhaps a touch hopeful, some very well documented) which, as a consolidated whole, amounts to a fundamental revisionist argument. His case – and I think he must be right, although some may be able to tweak his position here and there – is that Athens, resting on its ancient laurels and adapting its prime ancient temples to churches, was a major centre of Christian pilgrimage in the Byzantine era, attracting emperors, saints and a series of miraculous narratives. The progression of chapters give us a slew of distinguished pilgrims from the emperors Constans ii (in 662–3) and Basil the Bulgar-slayer (in 1018) as well as Henry (Latin emperor of Constantinople, in 1209) via a string of saints such as Luke of Stiris (the hermit who founded Hosios Loukas), western pilgrims like Saewulf the Anglo-Saxon in about 1102, to medieval bishops and their surviving sermons (of whom Michael Choniates, bishop 1182–1205, is the most distinguished). Within the history of the adaptation of temples to churches, Athens – and in particular the Parthenon – strikes a note of quite exceptional continuity and care. The classical temple was turned into a church with the minimum of defacement, nobody knows when, by whom or why – but let us assume before ad 600. Its pagan home of the Virgin goddess, the Parthenos, was transformed into a Christian dedication to the Virgin Mother of God, the Atheniotissa, whose festivals and specific connections across the Mediterranean world echo, albeit on a smaller scale, those of her pagan predecessor. The famous Phidian statue of Athena had already been destroyed in a fire (attested by no source but irrefutable on archaeological evidence) probably in the third century, and its successor had been removed as a museum-piece to Constantinople before the conversion; but most of the fifth-century bc marble relief sculpture was preserved in situ. Strikingly, when an enlarged apse was added to the eastern end of what had once been the cella in the twelfth century, this necessitated the removal of the central scene on the eastern side of the frieze, which was not only taken down with care (Kaldellis says with a crane) but preserved for view by the Byzantines, eventually being removed by Lord Elgin in the nineteenth century. This kind of affection for the cherished stones of a famous pagan temple is rare in Christian responses to antiquity, and arguably marks a limited case of classicism and respect for the Classical as the motor for acquiring a Christian identity. Choniates praises ancient Athens as an enemy of tyrants and a friendly home to wise men; and Kaldellis makes a good case for the miraculous light which various medieval sources report about the Christian Parthenon being itself the result of appropriating items to the Byzantine cathedral from the antiquarian reading of ancient sources like Pausanias, Plutarch and Strabo. Certainly the notion of building a Christian identity by means of and through the venerable distinction of a spectacular pre-Christian heritage is unusual in the process of Christianisation – though by no means out of keeping with the powerful forms of continuity and Hellenism that were particularly strong in the eastern Mediterranean. In trying to understand the Christian Parthenon's disruption of ‘the normative relationship between paganism and Christianity, between Athena and Atheniotissa’ (p. 177), Kaldellis turns to the theoretics of deconstruction and psychoanalysis, raising interesting issues of suppression, sublimation, dependency and anxiety. He is right that the Parthenon's evidence of Christian antiquarianism cashed out as devotion not only challenges us to rethink Byzantine piety but also our understandings of Byzantine Classicism (a topic on which Kaldellis himself wrote the major new monograph in 2008). But beyond this, his challenge is to the dismissal by modern scholarship of any interest in ancient Greece on the part of the Byzantines, and to the ways the modern Greek world has appropriated an ancient past in its modern reinvention that entirely cuts out Byzantium from the picture. It is hard not to agree with his questions here, though one might push the pattern further: the greatest church of Byzantium was St Sophia, and this too was carefully preserved, celebrated and used as the central mosque in the new dispensation when the Ottomans took over Constantinople in 1453.