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A full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Athens was built in 1897 in Nashville, Tennessee in the United States, as part of Tennessee's Centennial Exposition; Nashville has long been dubbed the Athens of the South, and the moniker influenced the choice of the building as the linchpin of that fair. Originally built of plaster, wood, and brick, it is, among various structures at the Exposition based on ancient originals, the only one to have been conceived as an exact reproduction, and the only one to have been preserved. In the 1920s it was rebuilt on the same foundations, but of concrete.

Today, the Parthenon, which functions as an art museum, stands as the centerpiece of Centennial Park, a large public park just west of downtown Nashville. Alan LeQuire's 1990 re-creation of the Athena Parthenos statue is the focus of the Parthenon just as it was in ancient Greece. The building is a full-scale replica of the Athenian original; and the statue of Athena Parthenos within is a reconstruction of the long lost original to careful scholarly standards: she is cuirassed and helmeted, carries a shield on her left arm and a small statue of Victory in her right palm, and stands 42 feet high, gilt with more than eight pounds of gold leaf; an equally colossal serpent rears its head between her and her shield. Since the building is complete and its decorations were polychromed (painted in colors) as close to the presumed original as possible, it is arguably a better representation of what the Athenians would have seen than is the current ruin of the Parthenon on the Acropolis.

This replica of the original Parthenon in Athens serves as a monument to what is considered the pinnacle of classical architecture. The plaster replicas of the Parthenon Marbles found in the Naos (the east room of the main hall) are direct casts of the original sculptures which adorned the pediments of the Athenian Parthenon, dating back to 438 BCE. The originals of these fragments are housed in the British Museum in London.

As an art museum, the Parthenon's permanent collection is a group of 63 paintings by 19th and 20th century American artists donated by James M. Cowan. Additional gallery spaces provide a venue for a variety of temporary shows and exhibits.

In the summertime, local theatre productions use the building as a backdrop for classic Greek plays such as Euripides' Medea and Sophocles' Antigone, performing (usually for free) on the steps of the Parthenon. Other performances, such as Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses, have been done inside, at the foot of Athena's statue.

Facts and figures

• The Parthenon in Athens was carved out of Pentelic marble and it took the Greeks approximately 10 years to construct the building, 447-438 B.C. Nashville's Parthenon was created from brick, stone, structural reinforced concrete, and cast concrete aggregate. It took the City of Nashville nearly 10 years to build their Parthenon, 1921-1931.
• All horizontal architectural elements arch slightly in the center. This means there are no true straight horizontal lines in the Parthenon. These architectural refinements made the Parthenon look alive and flawless to the human eye. This curvature is repeated in Nashville's Parthenon.
• The Parthenon is 65 feet high at its apex.
• The peristyle consists of 46 Doric columns, 17 on each side, 6 on each end (not counting the corner columns twice). All of the exterior columns incline slightly inward. The corner columns are diagonally inclined; that is, they are angled toward both sides. Scholars disagree on the precise reasons for these refinements, but they clearly serve the aesthetic functions of the building.
• The columns of the building differ in diameter from the ones beside them and are all spaced slightly differently.
• All of the columns share a refinement called the entasis, a slight bulge or convex curvature of the shaft. Thus, although the shaft tapers, the largest diameter is about one-third of the way up rather than at the base.
• The interior of the Parthenon is divided into two rooms. The east room is called the Naos and it houses the statue of Athena. The Naos is 93 feet long and 63 feet wide and has a two-story colonnade around three sides. The west room is 44 feet long by 63 feet wide and is called the Treasury Room. In antiquity this room housed the treasure of Athens and the Delian League.
  The bronze doors weight 7.5 tons each. They measure 24' high, 7' wide and 1' thick. There are two sets (4 doors total) of these enormous doors in the Parthenon. This makes them the largest set of matching bronze doors in the world. The Parthenon doors in antiquity were only slightly lighter and were wooden with a bronze overlay.
• Like its predecessor in Greece, the Parthenon in Nashville faces east. In antiquity this would allow light to come into the building as the sun came up and the doors were opened. Until 1988 visitors entered Nashville's Parthenon through the doors at the west end of the building. Visitors now must enter the east end of the building at the sidewalk level. The east façade was considered the "front" of the building by the ancient Greeks.
• The building was the backdrop for a major scene in the Robert Altman film masterpiece Nashville (1975).