The striking new Parthenon Museum embodies the Greek desire to get the Elgin Marbles back from Britain.
Ancient gods and centaurs flickered to life; horses, owls and deer danced across the Athenian skyline; statues of ancient girls blinked and tossed their hair as Greece opened its New Acropolis Museum, pressing its case that artworks from the 5th century BCE Acropolis should all be housed together.
“If Pericles’s Acropolis was a hymn to beauty, harmony and liberty, the Acropolis Museum today is the ‘ark’ which brings together all of the ideas that the Parthenon has stood for, since antiquity,” Greece’s Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis said in a speech. He added that the museum will bring “the reunification of the Parthenon marbles too especially because the Parthenon marbles speak in their entirety”.
Amid tight security, and with a backdrop of animated scenes from the collection in the $181 million museum, Greece is renewing its campaign to retrieve the Elgin Marbles, the sculptures taken from the Parthenon’s frieze to Britain 207 years ago and housed in the British Museum.
Completed three decades after the first call for a design, and after court cases and archaeological finds delayed construction, the museum, feel experts, is Greece’s answer to the British Museum’s argument that there’s nowhere else in the world where Elgin Marbles can be housed.
The frieze depicts gods, giants, Greeks and centaurs in the annual Panathenaic procession. White plaster replicas of the stones in the British Museum sit next to the sand-coloured stones left behind in Athens in the top glass gallery of the building designed by Bernard Tschumi. A terse “BM” is printed under the items still in London. Museums in Copenhagen and Paris are among others with sections of the stones.
The concrete-and-glass structure, with the gallery swivelled to complement the angle of the Parthenon temple on the top of the hill 300 metres above it, houses thousands of works from the Acropolis, some never seen before.
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The museum is designed to show the historical and social background of the 5th century BCE, something — Greece contends — lacking in the presentation of the Greek sculptures in the British Museum.
The collection in the new museum includes artworks such as “the Calfbearer”, the oldest statue on the Acropolis, dated to 570 BCE, and the “Cretan Boy”, created after 480 BCE, in the Archaic Gallery, which allows visitors to walk around the artworks. The artworks are placed to demonstrate the passage of time and impact of social and political events and how artists started to move away from the stylised forms of the “korres” statues to a more natural appearance.
The Caryatids, the columns sculpted in the form of females, stand in their original formation with a space for a missing member, housed in London. Even during antiquity the details of the backs of the statues weren’t visible, Alcestis Choremis, the retired director of Acropolis antiquities said.