THE INTERNATIONAL IMPACT for the OPENING OF new MUSEUM OF ACROPOLIS.
International research for the opening
www.Apodimos.com
We will present in all Greek and our Emigrant brothers, the international impact that had the openings of new MUSEUM OF ACROPOLIS through the International Press. And that because a Modern Museum Is Born, a lifelong vision, a bet that was finally won, a political pledge, a cultural duty, but above all «the need and duty of a Nation towards its legacy», the New Acropolis Museum that houses invaluable finds dating from the 4th Millennium BC to the 5th century AD found on the Sacred Hill of the Acropolis has finally come into being. That new Museum of Acropolis is situating a few metres away from the Acropolis entrance and the Ancient Theatre of Dionysos, the New Acropolis Museum, built on pedestrian walkway of Dionysiou Areopagitou Street, looks like hanging between the past and the present of Athens.
To below we present you what wrote the 14 international online press and that they faced the all this subject that concerns the Openings, the Parthenon and the stolen sculptures of Parthenon.
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Greece hopes museum will prompt Elgin Marbles' return
Updated at 10:01am on 21 June 2009
A new museum has opened in Athens, with a special gallery in it for the Elgin Marbles. The marbles are Greek sculptures that were part of the Parthenon, but have been held in London's British Museum for nearly 200 years.
Greece hopes the lavish opening ceremony for the Acropolis Museum, attended by foreign heads of state and government, will reinforce its claim for the return of almost half the stunning 160-metre frieze of a religious procession.
The 2,500-year-old sculptures were prised off the Acropolis walls in the early 1800s for Britain's diplomat Lord Elgin. He subsequently sold them to the British Museum where they remain.
Authorities in Greece are urging the museum in London to give them back what they say is rightfully theirs.
But despite the call, British museum spokesperson Hannah Boulton says the sculptures do not belong to Greece. "They are now museum objects," she says. "They are objects of world art and as such ... there is no problem with them being divided between two different museums and telling two different but complementary stories."
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/stories/2009/06/20/1245b64783e7
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Greece demands marbles return as new Acropolis opens
Published: 6/20/2009
ATHENS – Greece ramped up the pressure on Britain to return priceless statues from antiquity taken over 200 years ago, in a speech at Saturday's grand opening of the new Acropolis Museum.
President Carolos Papoulias reiterated his country's longstanding call for the return of the Elgin Marbles at the solemn ceremony to inaugurate the giant, 130-million-euro (180-million-dollar) glass and concrete building. "Today the whole world can see the most important sculptures of the Parthenon assembled, but some are missing; it's time to heal the wounds of the monument with the return of the marbles which belong to it," Papoulias said. The government says the museum, which dominates downtown Athens under the Parthenon temple, is the physical embodiment of a campaign dating back to 1983. "It's our identity and our pride," Papoulias said of the new museum.
The site, which had its origins in British jibes that Greece would have nowhere to display what are known in London as the Elgin Marbles if ever they did return, was designed to host the reunified artworks.
Greek Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said late Friday during a special advance opening for the media that the new museum space "now demolishes that excuse." About half of the Parthenon Marbles -- fifth-century Greek sculptures, inscriptions and architectural columns from the Parthenon and other buildings on the symbolic Acropolis hill -- are intact in the museum.
Of the remainder, most are held in London's British Museum after they were hacked away in the early 1800s on the orders of a British aristocrat and diplomat, Lord Elgin, under a deal with the then ruling Ottoman Empire. Replicas have been erected in the new galleries.
Five years late -- it was originally due to open around the Athens Olympic Games -- Greece invited heads of state from around the world for the opening.
Turkish premier Recep Tayip Erdogan cancelled at the last minute citing "health reasons," Greek officials said.
That left UN heritage chief Koichiro Matsuura and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso at the top table. Heads of state or government from Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovakia were joined by cultural emissaries from another 30-odd countries.
The government also invited British Museum officials to attend the opening despite their refusal to return the marbles -- and Greece's rejection of an offer to "loan" them back, which Athens said would confer ownership rights it denies. Stepping up Greece's campaign, Samaras appealed to "everyone around the world who believes in the values and ideas that emerged on the slopes of the Acropolis to join our quest to bring the missing Parthenon marbles home." Speaking in English, he said their "abduction" and "enforced exile" was "not only an injustice to us Greeks but to everyone in the world, the English included, because they were made to be seen in sequence and in total." That was "something that cannot happen as long as half of them are held hostage in the British Museum," he added.
An international campaigning group said Friday that the 2012 London Olympics would represent the perfect moment to send the relics home, given the origins of the games in ancient Greece. The objects were purchased by the British Parliament from Lord Elgin in 1816 and then presented to the British Museum. According to the latter, the London collection includes 247 feet (75 metres) of the original 524 feet of sculptured frieze; 15 of 92 metopes (panels); 17 figures from the pediments; plus other architectural furniture.
Designed by celebrated Franco-Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, the three-level Athens building offers panoramic views of the stone citadel and showcases sculptures from the golden age of Athenian democracy. Set out over a total area of 14,000 square metres (150,000 square feet), it harnesses natural light to show off more than 350 artefacts and sculptures that were previously held in a small museum atop the Acropolis. The museum opens to the public on Monday, and officials said full-house signs had already gone up through Tuesday following Internet reservations, with 11,000 advance tickets sold in total.
Heavy security was deployed in the capital ahead of ceremonials beginning at 8:00 pm (1700 GMT) and led by Greek President Karolos Papoulias, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and Samaras.
http://www.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=345869
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Greece opens Acropolis Museum, wants marbles back
Greece inaugurated its long-delayed Acropolis Museum on Saturday with the prime minister calling for the Classical Parthenon marbles, held in Britain for 200 years, to be repatriated.
The 2500-year-old sculptures were removed from the Parthenon in 1806 by Lord Elgin, then British ambassador to the Ottoman empire. "All the marbles have to come back ... it is not only the Greeks but the whole world that is asking for this," Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis told the opening ceremony, attended by about 400 dignitaries from around the world.
Planned to remind visitors of the 5th century BC monument visible across the street, the museum's top floor layout mimics the main temple of the Acropolis, the Parthenon. The display shows where those sculptures housed in the British Museum in London, would fit. "The Parthenon marbles will be reunited here, in the Acropolis Museum," Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said.
The British Museum long refused to return the sculptures, saying Greece had no where to display the marbles. The construction of the new museum has not changed its stance. The crowd of dignitaries were taken to a tour of the 14 000 square metre museum, with particular focus on the missing pieces. White plaster moulds of Olympian gods, heroes and animals, fill in the gaps of slabs now in London."The head of Athena is in Athens, the torso is in the British Museum," Dimitrios Pantermalis, president of the museum's board of directors said, guiding the visitors. "Some of these horses are in Athens but their heads are in London."
While Greece has said a loan would not be good enough, Bonnie Greer, deputy chair of the British Museum's board of trustees, who attended the ceremony, reiterated this idea. "We've never been asked to loan them, and that is what we are waiting for," she told Reuters. Plagued by protests and bureaucratic delays for decades the museum will open to visitors on Sunday for one euro. Tickets for the first three days, available only on the internet, have sold out. - Reuters
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-06-21-greece-opens-acropolis-museum-wants-marbles-back
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Greece demands marbles return at new Acropolis opening
ATHENS - Greece ramped up pressure on Britain to return priceless statues from antiquity taken over 200 years ago ahead of Saturday's grand opening of the new Acropolis Museum.
According to Greece's culture minister, the giant 130 million euro (S$263.7 million) glass and concrete display case, which dominates the Athens skyline under the Parthenon temple, is the physical embodiment of a campaign dating from 1983. The building, which had its origins in British jibes that Greece would have nowhere to display what are known in London as the 'Elgin Marbles' if ever they did return, was designed to host the reunified artworks.
Greek Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said late Friday at an advance opening for media that the new museum space 'now demolishes that excuse.' About half of the Parthenon Marbles - fifth century Greek marble sculptures, inscriptions and architectural columns that originally belonged to the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis - are intact in the museum. Of the remainder, most are held in London's British Museum after they were hacked away in the early 1800s on the orders of a British aristocrat and diplomat, Lord Elgin, under a deal with the then ruling Ottoman Empire. Replicas have been erected in the new galleries.
Five years late - it was originally due to open around the Athens Olympic Games - Greece invited heads of state from around the world for the opening.
Turkish premier Recep Tayip Erdogan cancelled at the last minute citing 'health reasons', Greek officials said, leaving UN heritage chief Koichiro Matsuura and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso at the top table.
Heads of state or government from Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovakia were joined by cultural emissaries from another 30-odd countries.
The government also invited British Museum officials to attend the opening despite their refusal to return the marbles - and Greece's rejection of an offer to "loan" them back, which Athens said would confer ownership rights it denies. Stepping up Greece's campaign, Samaras appealed to "everyone around the world who believes in the values and ideas that emerged on the slopes of the Acropolis to join our quest to bring the missing Parthenon marbles home". Speaking in English, he said their "abduction" and "enforced exile" was "not only an injustice to us Greeks but to everyone in the world, the English included, because they were made to be seen in sequence and in total". That was "something that cannot happen as long as half of them are held hostage in the British Museum", he added. An international campaigning group said Friday that the 2012 London Olympics would represent the perfect symbolic moment to send the relics home.
The objects were purchased by the British Parliament from Lord Elgin in 1816 and then presented to the British Museum. According to the museum's website, the London collection includes sculptures from the Parthenon, roughly half of what now survives: 75m of the original 150m of frieze; 15 of 92 metopes; 17 figures from the pediments, and various other pieces of architecture.
Designed by celebrated Franco-Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, the three-level Athens building offers panoramic views of the stone citadel and showcases sculptures from the golden age of Athenian democracy. Set out over a total area of 14,000 sqm, it displays more than 350 artefacts and sculptures that were previously held in a small museum atop the Acropolis.
Heavy security was deployed in the Greek capital for the evening ceremonials beginning at 1700 GMT which will be led by Greek President Karolos Papoulias, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and Samaras.
http://news.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/World/Story/A1Story20090620-149832.html
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The New Acropolis Museum: Vision Becomes Reality
A lifelong vision, a bet that was finally won, a political pledge, a cultural duty, but above all “the need and duty of a Nation towards its legacy,” the New Acropolis Museum that houses invaluable finds dating from the 4th Millennium BC to the 5th century AD found on the Sacred Hill of the Acropolis has finally come into being.
A Modern Museum Is Born
Squeezed between modern buildings and an imposing building constructed by Bavarian architect Wilhelm von Weiler, a few metres away from the Acropolis entrance and the Ancient Theatre of Dionysos, the New Acropolis Museum, built on pedestrian walkway of Dionysiou Areopagitou Street, looks like hanging between the past and the present of Athens.
Designed by Bernard Tschumi and Mihalis Fotiades, the new Acropolis Museum has a total area of 25,000 square meters, with exhibition space of over 14,000 square meters. Made of stainless steel, glass, marble and concrete, materials typical of the Athenian environment, the new museum has a direct view of the Acropolis, while it keeps its “distances” from the block of flats and the rest buildings on Makrygiannis Street. It is ten times more than that of the old museum on the Hill of the Acropolis, where, where due to lack of space, “the exhibits were piled up or kept in storerooms,” stressed Fotiades.
With bioclimatic planning, which gives ideal lighting and heating conditions, and designed to absorb noises and cemented enough to survive earthquakes measuring up to 10.0 on the Richter scale, the New Museum offers all the amenities expected in an international museum of the 21st century. “Never did we try to give the building an ancient-Greek or neo-classical touch, because our goal was to keep it anonymous, as a shell embracing the universals features of our civilization,” explained the leading architect.
Founded on the remains of ancient houses and workshops stretching on the south slopes of the Acropolis and were surfaced thanks to excavations, the new museum looks like hanging above an ancient Athenian quarter………. for more info select to http://news.ert.gr/en/23857-neo-mouseio-akropoleos-apo-to-orama-stin-pragmatikotita.htm
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The new Greek Acropolis Museum
The Acropolis will this year have a museum fit for Greece’s greatest treasure, the Elgin Marbles
Mark Hodson
A new museum will open in Athens later this year. No big deal, you might think. You’d be wrong. The New Acropolis Museum is not merely a dazzling piece of modernist architecture, but the latest gambit in a 200-year campaign for the return of the Elgin Marbles.
The museum, which has been 30 years in the planning and has cost the Greek government more than £100m, will at last provide a permanent home for the greatest treasures of the classical period, safe from the city’s corrosive, polluted air. Built in the shadow of the Acropolis, it will display the sections of the marbles owned by Greece – alongside plaster copies of the “missing” sections that reside in the British Museum. Whether the trustees of the British Museum will be persuaded to give up one of their biggest crowd-pullers, only time will tell.
But regardless of the outcome, the Greek authorities have created a world-class attraction, as I discovered recently on an exclusive tour with the museum’s curator, Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis.
First, the history. In the early 19th century, the Parthenon was under attack by looters. Lord Elgin, the British ambassador, hired a team of workers to hack away at the monument, taking many of its finest sculptures and large chunks of the marble frieze that lined the inside rim. Elgin shipped the treasures back to England and then sold them to the British Museum for £35,000.
Fast-forward to the late 20th century. The marbles remain divided. Scientists discover the pollution in Athens is eating into the fabric of the Parthenon. The original Acropolis museum, built in the late 19th century, is cluttered and poorly maintained. A new museum is planned.
It took 25 years of wrangling before an architect was chosen: the controversial, Swiss-born Bernard Tschumi. His high-tech angular design – all glass, concrete and marble – stands in bold contrast to the monuments on the Acropolis. It’s a huge two-fingered salute to traditionalists, as emphatically modern and pleasing as IM Pei’s Louvre Pyramid in Paris.
Problems began as soon as the first spadeful of earth was dug. Beneath the site, builders discovered the remains of a settlement dating from the 4th century BC. Before each foundation was laid, protracted negotiations took place between architects, engineers and archeologists. The result, though, is astonishing. The three-storey building appears to float over the ground on concrete piles, while beneath it the entire 4,000 sq metre site has been preserved. As you approach the entrance, you look down through glass panels cut into the plaza floor to see more than 2,000 years of history below, including immaculate mosaics. Once inside, you climb a glass-floored ramp lined with some of the 50,000 artefacts found during the dig. “There are lifts, but we want people to walk up to remind them of the walk to the top of the Acropolis hill,” said Pandermalis.
We then went into a vast gallery designed to house 120 sculptures from the Archaic period. Daylight flooded in through floor-to-ceiling windows and glass panels high above our heads. “The light is so beautiful in here, and it changes with the time of day and the seasons,” said the professor, standing before a towering statue of a goddess. “Look at the texture, the detail, it’s so soft. You can’t get that with artificial light.” I admired the quality of the marble. “We spent a long time choosing it,” he said. “It comes from Helicon, the sacred mountain of the Muses.” The sheer scale – 10 times the size of the original Acropolis museum, with 14,000 sq metres of floor space – means exhibits have room to breathe. Visitors can wander between the thick concrete columns to find fresh angles and perspectives. It feels more like a temple than an exhibition space. Beautiful though it was, Pandermalis was clearly anxious to get me up to the top floor, a huge glass-walled gallery where the treasures of the Parthenon will be displayed. Even without any exhibits, this would be a stunning building, with panoramic views across the city.………. for more info select to http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/destinations/greece/article4268110.ece
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Greece Readies Global Reception for $181 Million Athens Museum
By Maria Petrakis
June 19 (Bloomberg) -- Greece officially opens its New Acropolis Museum tomorrow after years of delays, rekindling its campaign to have the British Museum return its collection of 5th-century B.C. artworks taken from the Parthenon temple.
President Karolos Papoulias, Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, and European Commission President Jose Barroso will speak at the opening, details of which continue to be a closely guarded secret. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is attending. The ceremony, costing less than half the 6 million euros originally budgeted, will be broadcast live on Greek TV and online. “Everything is ready,” Dimitris Pandermalis, the professor of archaeology who has overseen the project, said in a phone interview. “The ceremony will be plain and elegant, not spectacular. We’re leaving spectacular to the museum and its exhibits.”
The 130 million-euro ($181 million) museum is Greece’s answer to the British argument that there’s nowhere in Greece to house the Elgin Marbles, the sculptures taken from the Parthenon’s frieze to Britain 200 hundred years ago. The frieze depicts gods, giants, Greeks and centaurs in the annual Panathenaic procession. At the opening, characters from the frieze will come to life and be projected across the night sky.
Architect Bernard Tschumi’s concrete-and-glass structure will have the stones Greece still has as the centerpiece, in a glass gallery that’s swiveled at an angle to the rest of the building, complementing the angle of the Parthenon temple on the top of the hill 300 meters above it. White plaster replicas of the stones in the British Museum will sit next to the sand- colored stones that were left behind.
Legal Owner
Successive U.K. governments have said the marbles won’t be returned. British Museum director Neil MacGregor, in a 2007 interview, said objects could in theory be loaned for three or six months, though this would be impossible while the Greek government refused to acknowledge the Museum as the legal owner. Samaras said this month that would be unacceptable to any Greek government.
The opening is also slotting in to Greece’s “A Masterpiece you can Afford” tourism campaign, designed to entice visitors amid the global crisis. Greece is expecting 2.5 million visitors to the museum annually.
Bus Ticket
Admission has been set at 1 euro, the price of a bus ticket. To drive the point home, Athens buses and trains on the subway have been decorated with scenes of the frieze for the past week. The ticket price will increase to 5 euros next year “when some global recovery is in sight”, Samaras said last month.
The number of paying visitors to the Acropolis fell 7 percent last year to just over 1 million people, according to figures from the country’s statistics office. In Greece, tourism accounts for 16 percent of gross domestic product and one in 5 jobs.
Not every Greek will be celebrating the opening of the museum. Owners and supporters of a campaign to save two historic buildings that back on to the site are still battling the fate of other homes on the site: demolition.
In August last year, worshippers of ancient Greek gods held the first service at the Parthenon in more than a millennium after statues on the site were moved to the new museum.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=atmzf92T21RU
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Opening of New Acropolis Museum Revives Debate Over Once-Stolen Artifacts
June 19, 2009 12:00 PM
by Haley A. Lovett
Plaster replicas of the Elgin Marbles will be on display for the opening of the new Acropolis Museum, as Greece holds out hope that the British Museum will one day return the original statues.
AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris
Five of six late 5th century B.C. sculptures
are displayed in the new Acropolis Museum.
The sixth is in the British Museum in London.
The statues in question, taken from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin in the 1800s, have since become part of the collection of the British Museum, according to Bloomberg.com. The Associated Press reports that the Elgin statues make up about half of those that survived after the Parthenon was hit by a canon 1687. The statues were part of a depiction of a religious procession and include figures of men, gods, centaurs and giants.
Greek officials had hoped to display that religious procession in its entirety in the new Acropolis Museum, which opens on June 20. However, according to the AP, the Elgin statues will not be among the thousands of ancient sculptures housed by the museum. Instead, plaster copies of those statues will fill out the procession.
Cultural Minister Antonis Samaras told the AP that he hopes the new museum will encourage the return of the statues. The British Museum had offered to loan the statues to the new Acropolis Museum, but with the condition that the Acropolis Museum acknowledge that the statues belong to the British Museum. Samaras told Bloomberg.com that such an acknowledgement would be like “legitimizing the snatching of the marbles and the carving up of the monument 207 years ago.”
The Acropolis is a raised rocky area of land in Athens that is home to the Parthenon and other notable Greek monuments. In the 8th century B.C., according to the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, a temple to Athena Polias was built on the site and the Acropolis first became a sacred place. In the centuries that followed more buildings were constructed on the site, including the precursor to the Parthenon. When the Persians attacked Athens in 480 B.C. many of the buildings were nearly destroyed. During the mid-fifth century B.C. great artists and architects of the time constructed the buildings that exist on the Acropolis today.
In the hundreds of years leading up to the present day, Athens suffered from much political unrest and the buildings were used for many purposes, including munitions storage, housing for rulers, and as churches. The Parthenon was hit by a canon in 1687 and destroyed, and was later looted by Lord Elgin.
Many efforts have been made in the last century to restore some of the monuments at the Acropolis. According to the Acropolis Restoration Service, efforts to preserve and restore the Parthenon began when Greece was established as an independent state in the 1800’s. After early efforts at restoration proved to be insufficient, Greece established a committee in the 1970s to help with the restoration process.
Cases such as the dispute over the Elgin statues are nothing new in the art and archeology world. In 2008 Italian authorities were able to recover a record amount of stolen artifacts and artwork, a move they attributed to increased efforts to stop illegal archeological digs and smuggling of illegal works out of the country.
It is not uncommon for Italian land owners to find previously unknown ancient buried treasures and artifacts. Even the building of a subway system in Rome has proven to be a quite daunting archeological feat, as workers continually uncover ancient relics. Artifacts such as the ones found buried can often sell for a great deal of money, making it tempting for the finders to keep them rather than turn them over to authorities, as is the law.
Over the last few years, a few U.S. museums have worked with Italian authorities and returned pieces of artwork once stolen from Italy. Though stolen pieces of art do not always get returned to their home country or owners. Many artifacts were taken from Jewish people in Europe during World War II, and some, though not nearly all, have been returned. Iraqi people have also been victim to wartime looting, and there is little a war-torn country can do to prevent loss of such artifacts.
http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/Europe/2009/june/Opening-of-New-Acropolis-Museum-Revives-Debate-Over-Once-Stolen-Artifacts.html#0#0
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'Our goal is to have the best museum in the world'
Stephen Moss ,The Guardian,
Ancient Athens lies at the root of western culture, yet the battles over the marbles that once adorned the Parthenon have been far from civilised. Could the city's new Acropolis Museum offer a fresh beginning?
The Parthenon in Athens, viewed from the glass gallery that houses the New Acropolis Museum's marbles. Photograph: Stephen Moss
"Forgive me, it is crazy," says Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis, president of the Organisation for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum, explaining why he has kept me waiting for almost half an hour in the museum's spacious reception. Pandermalis is the elderly, dignified archaeologist at the centre of the latest - and the Greek government hopes concluding - chapter in the saga of the Parthenon/Elgin Marbles, and the pressure is beginning to tell. "I hate all this publicity," he says. "This is not my job, but I have to manage it."
Beware Greeks bearing gifts. An adage I should have borne in mind before accepting an invitation to be the first journalist to be allowed to see the museum's completed galleries, and the first person to photograph the inside of the airy glass box at the top of the museum which will house the part of the Parthenon Marbles held by the Greeks. This is a rare privilege, but it also means being drawn into the seemingly endless controversy that has raged since Lord Byron savaged the seventh earl of Elgin for removing large chunks of the statuary from the Parthenon in the first decade of the 19th century - a cache that ended up in the British Museum a decade later and has been a source of resentment in Greece ever since. The Greeks may hope their splendid new museum - which has been almost 40 years in the planning (twice as long as it took for their ancient forebears to build the Parthenon) and cost €130m - will bring the issue to a head, but the portents are not good.
The new museum, designed by the Swiss-American architect Bernard Tschumi and just a few minutes' walk from the Acropolis, is meant to demonstrate once and for all that the Greeks could look after the sculptures as well, if not better, than the famous institution that has housed them for close on two centuries, ever since the bankrupt Lord Elgin sold the works he had taken from the Parthenon to the British government for £35,000 in 1816. Before the great strategic issues can be dealt with, however, Pandermalis has earthier concerns. The wiring, for a start. "We told the construction company about this a year ago," he says, as we pass a group of workmen who are adjusting cables, "and they leave it until the week before the opening." Men are up ladders peeling plastic off 2,500-year-old sculpted tablets (called metopes); young women are giving a final wash to small replicas of the statues which originally bookended the Parthenon; the gift shop is an empty shell. But the professor insists all will be ready for the official launch by the president of Greece on Saturday.
The museum is entered up a ramp that faintly echoes the slope up to the Acropolis. On the first floor are arrayed the gorgeous statues of the pre-Parthenon period - principally from the sixth century BC, when the Acropolis was already well established as the centre of the city's cultural and religious life. The old temples were swept away by Persian invaders in 490BC, and 40 years later the Athenians - at the height of their power - embarked on the building of the Parthenon, which was to serve as the home to a 40ft golden statue of the goddess Athena (made of wood and ivory, and lost in the fourth century AD) and as a treasury. Ancient Greeks had no qualms about mixing religion and money.
The sculptures from the Parthenon itself are housed in the glass gallery above. It has the precise dimensions of the Parthenon, is oriented to face it directly on the hillside opposite, and attempts to recreate the outer series of metopes showing mythological battles and the inner frieze depicting a procession of Athenians paying homage to Athena. The new gallery combines the sculptures held in Greece with plaster casts of those held in London (there are also smaller holdings in the Louvre and several other international museums, all of which Greece wants returned). Even some individual statues are divided between locations. On one, a single hand is picked out as a white plaster cast. The body is in Athens; the hand resides in Munich. But initially the Greeks' attention is on London and the British Museum, which has half of the surviving sculptures. "Everybody asks, 'How can it be that this figure is half London, half Athens?'" says Pandermalis.
Some of the statues and reliefs have been lost completely, and gaps have been left to show what cannot be located anywhere. What can be gathered together is a crucial question in settling whether the marbles should be returned, and there is a staggering disparity between the two sides. Pandermalis says that if everything came back, more than 85% of the original could be reconstituted, but this is disputed by the British Museum, which says that half the metopes, a third of the frieze and more than half of the statuary that adorned the pediments at each end of the temple are lost. If Pandermalis is right, there would be a strong case for bringing all the material back together; if the British Museum is right, the Greek case is much weaker.
This is art by numbers, but these numbers count. Those who favour returning the Elgin Marbles to Athens tend to skate over what has been lost. Take Nadine Gordimer, who has contributed the preface to a new edition of Christopher Hitchens's book, The Parthenon Marbles, a typically vigorous argument in favour of repatriation first published in 1987. Gordimer seems oblivious to the fact that Elgin was further wrecking something that was already wrecked - much of the material he brought back was not hacked from the building but had already been blown off in 1687, when the Venetians attacked the Parthenon (unhelpfully, the besieged Turks were using it as an ammunition dump). She also assumes, erroneously, that the British Museum, by releasing what it holds, would magically return at least the frieze to its original form. "Coherence can and must be restored," she writes, in a passage stronger on rhetoric than fact.
Hitchens is guilty of the same error. "Picture the panel of the Mona Lisa, if it had been sawn in half by art thieves during, say, the Napoleonic wars," he writes in the introduction to the new edition. "Imagine the two halves surviving the conflict, with one ending up in a museum in Copenhagen and the other in a gallery in Lisbon. Would you not be impatient, not to say eager, to see how the two would look when placed side by side?" Perhaps, but does our fascination wane if the middle third is missing? How would we feel about the Mona Lisa if we had the top of her head, her body and her hands, but were missing her enigmatic smile?……….for more info select to http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jun/16/acropolis-museum-athens-elgin-marbles
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Acropolis Museum's 'pain and loss'
By Barnaby Phillips
The opening of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, the Greek capital, is a major cultural event. It also, and quite deliberately as far as the Greeks are concerned, re-ignites passions and debate around one of the longest-running cultural controversies in the world.
The museum will host treasures from the ancient Acropolis of Athens
The museum will host treasures from the ancient Acropolis of Athens. But some of the most important of these - including many marble sculptures from the Parthenon temple - are faraway on the other side of Europe, in the British Museum in London. By building this impressive new museum, the Greeks believe they have made a compelling case for everything to be returned to Athens. And yet, the initial signals coming from the British should give the Greeks little ground for encouragement.
The new museum has been several decades in planning, and has cost some $200 million. A bold and striking modern building, it is located right at the foot of the hill of the ancient Acropolis. It sits above ancient ruins, and looms over the tightly packed Athenian streets. Inside, it is flooded with natural light, and its galleries provide a spacious and calm contrast to the congested chaos of the city. The wonderful statues and sculptures capture the glory of ancient Greece, from where came the ideas and philosophies that still shape our world. The museum's crowning glory is its top floor, or Parthenon gallery.
Plaster subsitutes
Here, with the 2,500-year-old Parthenon temple in clear view on the nearby hill, the entire frieze, a series of sculptures portraying an ancient procession, is displayed in exactly the same order and dimensions as they would have been on the temple. The only snag is that large parts of the frieze (and the outer panels, known as metopes) are not in Greece's possession and these gaps have been filled in with plaster-cast substitutes.
The museum sits above ancient ruins and looms over tightly packed Athenian streets
To explain how this situation came about, we need to go back about 200 years, to the beginning of the 19th century, when Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire. Much has been written on how the 7th Lord Elgin, Britain's ambassador to the Ottomans, obtained controversial permission to remove some of the Parthenon sculptures and take them back to Britain. Lord Elgin’s supporters have tried to portray him as an altruistic conservationist, concerned with rescuing Greece's ancient heritage, whilst his many detractors describe him as a plundering imperialist.
The truth may be somewhere in-between, but in any case Lord Elgin ended up selling "his" marbles to the British government, who placed them in London's British Museum, where they have been ever since.Bernard Tschumi is the Swiss-American architect of the new Acropolis Museum. He told me he had only "unformed thoughts" on the Parthenon marble controversy when he started out on this project. But now, he says, "When I got to know what it meant, I became increasingly committed, when I realised [the marbles] told one single story, I saw they cannot be broken up".
Greece's minister of culture, Antonis Samaras, is more forthright. He says: "Imagine if Picasso's Guernica or da Vinci's Mona Lisa were in two or three parts, scattered round Europe; would you not want them put back together? ".
The British Museum’s trustees are unwilling to give historic marble artifacts to the Greek
Artefacts 'vandalised'
Now, according to Samaras, "the injustice that was made, we want it once and for all cleared and finished". "We know these items were vandalised, they just took part of the front of a whole piece of art just to put it in a foreign museum; this is something that no-one can accept." But in London, there is no sign that the British Museum's trustees are contemplating giving the Marbles back. They argue that their museum, with no entry charge, is the most visited in the world -six million people pass through its doors each year.
Hannah Boulton, a spokeswomen for the British Museum, says the existing situation, with about half the surviving Marbles in London, and the other half in the new museum in Athens, is a happy medium that enables the optimum number of people to see them in different contexts. In the British Museum, it is possible to compare the Greek Marbles with treasures from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome and so on, and understand how different ancient civilizations adapted and influenced each other, in a way that would never be possible in Athens. "All civilisations can be seen here in one building", Boulton says, and "obviously the Parthenon sculptures are a very important part of that mission, so the trustees feel its very important that they remain here as part of this worldwide collection".
Greeks are united in their insistence that the Marbles should be brought back. Without them, the Parthenon continues to evoke not only feelings of pride, but also pain and loss.
After a torrid few months, of political scandal, street riots and the re-emergence of domestic extremist groups, the opening of the new Acropolis Museum provides many people here with pride and satisfaction. But until it houses all the treasures it was built for, it will, somehow, feel incomplete
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2009/06/200961971155960353.html
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Acropolis Museum unveiled in Greece
Gods, heroes and long-dead mortals stepped off their plinths into the evening sky of Athens during the lavish launch of the new Acropolis Museum, a decades-old dream that Greece hopes will also help reclaim a cherished part of its heritage from Britain.
The digital animated display on the museum walls ended years of delays and wrangling over the ultra-modern building, set among blocks of flats and elegant neo-classical houses at the foot of the Acropolis hill.
The nearly three million euro (£2.55 million) opening ceremony was attended by some 400 guests, including European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, Unesco Director-General Koichiro Matsuura, and foreign heads of state and government.
Conspicuously, there were no government representatives from Britain, which has repeatedly refused to repatriate dozens of 2,500-year-old sculptures from the Parthenon temple that are held in the British Museum.
http://www.teletext.co.uk/news/worldnews/f2db4d99f3c43941d9599939d0bf69d9/Acropolis+Museum+unveiled+in+Greece.aspx
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Greece to open Acropolis Museum amid marbles row
Athens, June 20, 2009
The Greek government launched a new plea for a London museum to return priceless Parthenon marbles ahead of the grand opening yesterday of the Acropolis Museum in Athens. Greece has invited a slew of international leaders to unveil the long-delayed museum at the foot of the ancient citadel which was originally intended to open in time for the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
The government also invited British Museum officials to attend the opening despite their refusal to return the Parthenon marbles.
The Parthenon marbles are known as the Elgin Marbles in Britain after the aristocrat who in 1806 expropriated them from Greece. The Acropolis Museum, that houses replicas of the sculptures held in London, represents a new "call for the return of the Parthenon marbles," Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said late on Friday.
An international group campaigning for the return of the marbles said the 2012 Olympics hosted by London would represent a perfect symbolic moment to bring the relics back to Greece. "We urge the United Kingdom to begin the process of reunifying the Parthenon sculptures in the (New Acropolis Museum)," said David Hill, president of the International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures. "We believe that the occasion of the 2012 London Olympics would be an appropriate time to return the Parthenon sculptures to Greece," Mr Hill, whose group has members in 17 countries, told reporters in Athens.
Designed by celebrated Franco-Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, the glass building offers panoramic views of the stone citadel and showcases sculptures from the golden age of Athenian democracy in the fifth century BCE. The three-level building set out over a total area of 25,000 square metres will display more than 350 artefacts and sculptures that were previously held in a small museum atop the Acropolis. Heavy security was deployed in the Greek capital for the grand opening in the evening.
Greek President Karolos Papoulias, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and Samaras will open the ceremony.
Guests include European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, UNESCO chief Koichiro Matsura, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan and the heads of state and government of several European nations.
http://www.watoday.com.au/world/greece-to-open-acropolis-museum-amid-marbles-row-20090621-csa2.html
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New Acropolis Museum to showcase complete Parthenon sculptures
2009-06-19
by Liang Yeqian
ATHENS, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Visitors from across the world will admire the complete sculptures of the famous Parthenon Temple for the first time when the new Acropolis Museum officially opens on June 20.
Photo taken on June 18, 2009 shows the sculptures inside the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, capital of Greece. Visitors from across the world will admire the complete sculptures of the famous Parthenon Temple for the first time when the new Acropolis Museum officially opens on June 20. (Xinhua/Liang Yeqian)
Dimitros Pantermalis, director of the new museum, told Xinhua that all of the Parthenon Temple sculptures owned by Greece will be displayed on the third floor of the new museum.
Replicas of the sculptures in the British Museum which were taken from Parthenon's frieze some 200 years ago will sit next to those left in Greece. "As you know, Parthenon sculptures were divided in Athens and London. After a long discussion, the museum decided not to leave the space empty, but to put on display the copies of the pieces we miss in London," Pantermalis said. "This is the privilege of the museum and the big sculptures are really a feast of culture," he said.
Pantermalis said this museum houses very important findings and cultural objects of world heritage. "The exhibits are very important, and therefore the ceremony should be a big one," he said, referring to the grand opening ceremony which will be held in the evening of this coming Saturday. On the security and insurance for the museum, Pantermalis said he thinks no bank can pay for any missing exhibits since they are of incalculable value. "I think it is more important to have very good guards in the museum and use modern systems and cameras to check the exhibits everyday and every moment. For us it is more important to know what is going on in the museum every minute," he said.
Pantermalis said the Acropolis Museum had held two exhibitions in Beijing during the Olympic Games in 2008. It is a good idea to plan for a future exhibition in China. We hope to be able to make a bigger exhibition in China," he said.
The new Acropolis Museum is located some 300 meters away from the Acropolis. It is a modern building with glass walls and floors. Visitors could enjoy the antiquities from the ancient temples while looking at the Acropolis through the glass.
Compared with the old Acropolis Museum which covers an area of 1,500 sq meters, the new museum has a total area of 25,000 sq meters.
Heads of state and government, celebrities and world media have been invited to attend the opening ceremony on Saturday.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-06/19/content_11566995.htm
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Athens, Greece, to Celebrate Opening of New Acropolis Museum
Phil Bolton
It’s official. The New Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece, is scheduled to open on June 20 after an eight-year campaign to get it designed and built. “The opening is a big thing for us,” Greece’s consul in Atlanta, Vassilios Gouloussis, told GlobalAtlanta. “We have fulfilled our promise to give to the world a state of the art museum.”
The opening also is Greece’s answer to the British argument that its capital has no appropriate location to house the Elgin Marbles, the sculptures taken from the Parthenon frieze to the British Museum in London.
Mr. Gouloussis evoked the memory of Melina Mercouri, the Greek actress, singer and political activist, who launched in the early 1980s a campaign for the return of the Elgin Marbles. But the British Museum has given no indication that it will do so. “Their main argument was that Athens didn’t have an appropriate museum or a place worth having them, but now we can counter that,” he added. The marbles from the Parthenon’s east and west friezes that Greece retained have been mounted for display. In a not very subtle statement about the missing ones, modern replicas fill in the gaps. Mr. Gouloussis said that the opening ceremonies would be a high profile event with dignitaries from throughout Europe and the rest of the world attending.
Its birth has been a difficult labor delayed by numerous challenges including an earthquake prone site some 300 yards south of the Acropolis hill.
During a 2008 video interview, Dimitrios Pandermalis, the museum’s president, described the entire project as a multicultural enterprise with glass crews coming in from Germany and the United Kingdom and concrete workers form Albania, India, Russia and Greece itself. Dr. Pandermalis estimated that once the museum is finally opened it will attract annually 3 million visitors, who will acquire “a realistic idea” of what classicism is all about.
For Mr. Gouloussis, the opening is one of several events that provide an antidote to the current economic crisis. Athens also is to have a new opera house and a new library, which will provide additional occasions for celebration.
http://www.edays.globalgeorgia.com/article/17372/
