About
An ancient Greek lion at the Venetian Arsenal is adorned with Viking runes dating back thousands of years.
The Piraeus Lion was renowned even in antiquity, when it guarded the port of Athens. In 1687, during the sixth Ottoman-Venetian war, Francesco Morosini, a well-known Venetian naval commander, stole it as war plunder. He is remembered for this exploit, as well as for his destruction of the Parthenon; while the Ottomans held Athens at the time, they used the Parthenon as a gunpowder storehouse - one of Morosini's cannons fired right into it and reduced it to a heap of ruins in an instant. Standing nine feet tall and carved from marble in the 4th century BC, this lion is especially remarkable today due to mysterious inscriptions on its shoulders dating back to an age before Venetians even reached Venice: they were made by a Viking mercenary about 1000 years ago, although faded and weatherworn now, they can still be seen.
