The Pergamon Altar's long and winding road to Berlin

This is what the acropolis in Pergamon is said to have looked like, and this is where King Eumenes II had the Pergamon Altar erected sometime between 180 and 159 BC, presumably to honor the gods Zeus and Athena. Traveling merchants mentioned Pergamon as early as the Middle Ages: 14th-century Italian Cyriacus of Ancona claimed he had found the ruins of a lost city.

In 1625, an agent named William Petty brought parts of the altar to England for an art collector, the Earl of Arundel. The collection was eventually forgotten, until decades later, when archaeologists discovered a panel in the wall of a home in Worksop (pictured). It proved to be a frieze from the Pergamon Altar. A second panel was found in a neo-Gothic ruins in a country estate in Oxfordhshire.

More than 200 years later, the Ottoman Empire commissioned Carl Humann, a German engineer and passionate hobby archaeologist, to build a coastal road. He noticed ancient ruins jutting out of the ground along the designated route. He began to dig - and then to send the antiquities he found to Berlin.

At the outset of the excavation in 1887, Carl Humann bragged he hadn't just found "a dozen relief panels," but an entire art epoch that had been "buried and forgotten." But it was Alexander Conze, the director of the Berlin Royal Museums' sculpture collection, who recognized the actual value and quality of the discovery.

A few years later, Sultan Abdul Hamid II sold foreign archaeologists the rights to explore the culture of Asia Minor and to send some of their findings home. The Germans paid a handsome price for the Pergamon Altar in its entirety.

The altar was reconstructed and the frieze fragments were assembled in the right order. In 1901, the Battle Between the Giants and the Olympian Gods, hewn in stone, was opened to the public. Found to be structurally unsound, the first Pergamon Museum was closed again just seven years later.

In 1930, the Pergamon Altar was opened to the public again, this time in the newly erected Pergamon Museum - but not for long. To protect the antique structure during World War II, it was moved to a bunker near the city zoo. The Soviet Union claimed the Pergamon Altar after the end of the war, moving it to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). It was relocated to Berlin in 1958.

In 1998, Turkey requested the antique shrine be returned to its original site, repeating the claim again three years later. But the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees the Berlin collection, is adamant that the altar was purchased legally and is not to be repatriated.

The Pergamon Altar has crisscrossed Europe since the Middle Ages, before finally coming to rest in Berlin, where the monumental construction has consistently drawn crowds to the city's Museum Island. Currently closed for renovation, the magnificent exhibit is to open again to the public in 2023.