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A Home for the Marbles
LONDON — This weekend, the new museum of the Acropolis will open its doors in Athens, in a striking modern building situated at the foot of the rock itself.
For a long time, it has not really been possible for a visitor to Greece to visit the buildings on that most famous of all hills, and also the sculpture that used to adorn them in the days of the cult of Pallas Athena.
Atmospheric pollution and structural weakness necessitated the protective removal of a good number of the statues and carvings, and bureaucratic and political delays kept on putting off the day when a serious gallery for their exhibition could be provided.
Now, however, it will be possible for a tourist to walk around the temples of the Acropolis — which themselves have been undergoing an extensive and careful restoration — and then to stroll around a museum, within sight of the temples, where the carvings of Phidias and others are at last again on display.
I was fortunate enough to be given a tour of both sites earlier this year. I think that nobody can fail to be impressed by the combined efforts of Bernard Schumi, the Swiss architect, and Dimitrios Pandermalis, the museum’s director.
The crucial floor is the top one. Here, all the available treasures of the Parthenon have been lovingly and logically arranged in a gallery that is layered differently from other levels so as to replicate and mirror the layout of the temple, up at which it directs the visitor’s gaze. Given all the hazards of time and chance and weather, and all the vicissitudes that the Parthenon has suffered down the milennia, this is the nearest that one can currently come to a full enjoyment of the aesthetic whole.
But that’s where the rub lies. A huge portion of “the available treasures” of the Parthenon have been segregated from the main body and cannot be seen in harmony with it. I am referring to the so-called “Elgin marbles”: the huge chunks of the frieze, the pediment and the metopes (panels) that were quite literally “ripped off” from the Parthenon in the early 19th century, and carried off to Britain, where they were supposed to decorate Lord Elgin’s private home in Scotland. Only his bankruptcy saved them from this fate, and he contrived to sell them to the British government, which holds them to this day in the British Museum in London.
The “Elgin line,” of sculptural partition and annexation, runs through a poem in stone that was carved as a unity and that tells a single story. It even cuts through figures and characters in that story. The body of the goddess Iris is now in London, while her head is in Athens. The front part of the torso of Poseidon is in London and the rear part is in Athens. This is grotesque.
Recently, President Giorgio Napolitano of Italy paid a visit to the Acropolis Museum in order to return a fragment of the frieze — the foot of the goddess Artemis — that has been sitting for years in the Salinas Museum in Palermo. His generous gesture in helping reunify the masterpiece of the sculptor Phidias has been equaled by the Vatican museum, which has returned the head of a young man from panel No. 5 of the north frieze, and by the museum at Heidelberg, which has given back the foot of a young man playing the lyre on panel No. 8. But, still, huge expanses of the sculpture, with its honey-colored patina warmed by centuries of Attic sun, are represented in absentia by a doleful white plaster-cast simulation of the exiled brothers and sisters.
How long can the British authorities cling jealously to the loot of their former ambassador to a long-vanished Turkish empire? (Greece was a vassal state when Lord Elgin’s men showed up with their crowbars and cranes.)
For a long time, the British Museum did have a couple of plausible arguments in its quiver. It could try to maintain that restoring the marbles to Athens would set a precedent that might empty great museums of their collections. And it could call attention to the fact that the Greeks had nowhere to house the sculptural marvels.
The first argument was never as strong as it sounded: Where is the court that decides that an aesthetic gesture is a “precedent”? Have the Hittites and the Babylonians now besieged the Vatican for the return of every other treasure ever moved? Don’t be silly, in other words.
The only precedent that has any value is the good example set by Italian and German museums which understand that it makes no sense to wrench apart, and keep apart, a magnificent work of art.
As to the second objection, having dithered for years in a way that drove all of us Philhellenes nearly crazy, the Greeks have now excelled themselves in creating a place worthy of its breath-taking contents.
It is not a question of denuding one great and old European museum, so much as of completing another great and new one. The British people, when asked, have repeatedly shown that they want to do the right thing and reunify the sculpture. It is impossible to visit Athens and not yearn for the day when Britain decides to right an ancient wrong and show that a beautiful artefact is more than the mere sum of its parts.
Christopher Hitchens is the author of ‘‘Imperial Spoils: The Case for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles’’ and a columnist for Vanity Fair.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/opinion/19iht-edhitchens.html?_r=2&hpw
τηριστικά ο κ. Χίτσενς, σημειώνοντας ότι «όλοι οι διαθέσιμοι θησαυροί του Παρθενώνα έχουν τοποθετηθεί με ιδιαίτερη φροντίδα σε μια αίθουσα που βρίσκεται σε άλλο επίπεδο σε σχέση με το υπόλοιπο Μουσείο, ώστε να αντικατοπτρίζει τη διαρρύθμιση του ναού».Στο δημοσίευμα γίνεται αναφορά στις πρόσφατες επιστροφές τμημάτων του μνημείου από την Ιταλία και από το Μουσείο της Χαιδελβέργης, εκφράζοντας παράλληλα την ελπίδα ότι «κάποια μέρα η Βρετανία θα αποφασίσει να διορθώσει ένα λάθος του παρελθόντος».
Ο διευθυντής σύνταξης της «Καθημερινής» και διευθυντής του αγγλόφωνου εβδομαδιαίου έντυπου «Athens Plus», Νίκος Κωνσταντάρας, σε άρθρο του που φιλοξενείται στη νεοϋορκέζικη εφημερίδα, υποστηρίζει πως «αν το Βρετανικό Μουσείο θέλει να είναι πιστό στον αυτοπροσδιορισμό του ως φύλακας της παγκόσμιας κληρονομιάς, και αν πράγματι δεν αναγνωρίζει τις γεωγραφικές ή εθνικές καταβολές των θησαυρών που εκθέτει, τότε ας το αποδείξει αυτό· ας εγκαταλείψει το κτητικό προσδιορισμό από το όνομα του και να ονομάζεται απλώς «Μουσείο». Επίσης, θα μπορούσε να αντικαταστήσει το διοικητικό συμβούλιό του με αντιπροσώπους εθνών, των οποίων οι πρόγονοι δημιούργησαν τους θησαυρούς τους οποίους εκθέτει. Αυτό θα εγκαινίαζε μια νέα εποχή ανταλλαγών και συνεργασίας ανάμεσα στα μουσεία του κόσμου. Θέματα ιδιοκτησίας θα ήταν δευτερεύοντα σε αυτό το νέο διάλογο ελεύθερων και ίσων χωρών».
http://exastal.blogspot.com/2009/06/new-york-times.html
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Gods, heroes and long-dead mortals stepped off their plinths into the evening sky of Athens on Saturday 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 ultramodern building, set among apartment blocks and elegant neoclassical houses at the foot of the Acropolis hill.
The nearly euro3 million ($4.1 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 officials 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.
President Karolos Papoulias said Greeks think of the Acropolis monuments as their "identity and pride," and renewed the demand for the missing marble works, displayed in London for the past 200 years.
"The whole world can now see the most important sculptures from the Parthenon together," Papoulias said. "Some are missing. It is time to heal the wounds on the monument by returning the marbles that belong to it."
Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said the sculptures "will inevitably return," but ruled out Greece acknowledging the British Museum's legal title to the works — as requested by officials in London as a precondition for any loan.
Large crowds watched the heavily policed opening ceremony from nearby cafes, and families gathered on overlooking balconies.
Crouching 300 yards from the Parthenon's slender bones like a skewed stack of glass boxes, the euro130 million ($180 million) museum provides an airy setting for some of the best surviving works of classical sculpture that once adorned the Acropolis.
By day, printed glass panels filter the harsh sunlight while revealing the ancient citadel in the background. The internal lighting projects the battered statues outward at night, contrasting with the floodlit ruins on the low hill.
"We tried ... to be as simple, as clear, as precise as we could be establishing a visual relation between the Parthenon, the museum with the beautiful sculptures and with the archaeological remnants," said the building's designer, French-Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi.
And with a special glass hall designed to showcase all the surviving Parthenon sculptures in their original alignment, the building is Greece's answer to the argument that it had nowhere to safely house those sawed off the temple in the early 1800s by British diplomat Lord Elgin.
Among the exhibits are small sculptures recently returned from Italy, The Vatican and Germany.
The Parthenon was built at the height of Athens' glory, between 447-432 B.C., in honor of the city's patron goddess, Athena, and is still considered one of the most impressive buildings in the world.
Despite its burning by invading Goths in 267 A.D., conversion into a Christian church in the early 6th century and Ottoman occupation from the 15th century — when it served as a gunpowder store — it survived largely intact until a Venetian cannon shot caused a massive explosion in 1687. Elgin, a Scotsman, removed about half the surviving sculptures between 1801-04, when Greece was an unwilling part of the Ottoman Empire.
The British Museum has repeatedly rejected calls for their return. It says it legally owns the collection it bought from Elgin, who sold it to stave off bankruptcy, and that it is displayed free of charge in an international cultural context.
"I think they belong to all of us. We are all global citizens these days," said British Museum spokeswoman Hannah Boulton.
But on the top floor of the new Acropolis Museum, Greece's counter-argument — that the sculptures were looted from a work of art so important that the surviving pieces should all be exhibited together — is eloquently laid out.
The glass hall with a panoramic view across Athens and the Parthenon itself displays the section of the frieze that Elgin's agents left behind, joined to plaster casts of the 90-odd works in London.
The soft brownish patina of the original marble contrasts starkly with the bright white of the copies: battle scenes are cut jaggedly in half, with the torso and heads of warriors and horses in London and the legs in Athens. The attempt to shock is deliberate.
"It is like looking at a family picture and seeing images of loved ones far away or lost to us," Samaras said.
Greece has promised to compensate the British Museum with visiting exhibitions of major antiquities.
But the museum is much more than a political lever.
With about 150,000 square feet (14,000 square meters) of exhibition space, it holds more than 4,000 ancient works, many of them never displayed before due to lack of space in the cramped old museum that sat atop the Acropolis hill.
Most left the citadel for the first time in late 2007, during a meticulously choreographed operation using a relay of cranes.
Now visitors can walk among freestanding statues and reliefs with surviving traces of paint; view fragments of sculptures and coins still bearing scorch marks from the Persians' sacking of the city in 480 B.C.; gaze through three stories of glass floors straight into the foundations, where construction revealed an entire neighborhood of ancient and early Christian Athens.
The museum opens to visitors Sunday. Entry is at a nominal charge of euro1 ($1.40) until the end of the year, when it will increase to euro5. The first four days are already completely sold out through Internet sales.
- Acropolis Museum: http://www.theacropolismuseum.gr
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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Athens celebrates Tschumi's Acropolis museum
Athens has celebrated the opening of the new Acropolis museum, the culmination of many years' work by the internationally renowned Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi.
Swiss culture minister Pascal Couchepin, who announced his forthcoming resignation last week, joined a large group of dignitaries on Saturday for the historical occasion.
Couchepin was among 400 invited guests, including European Union Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, and the Director General of Unesco, Koichiro Matsuura.
Couchepin told swissinfo.ch that he was glad one of his last foreign trips brought him to the cradle of civilization. He said he was honoured to attend the opening of the museum with a Swiss connection.
The visit is also an opportunity to raise awareness of the Swiss presence on the international stage and to exchange views with other ministers.
Heads of state and government from at least 20 European and Mediterranean countries were invited to the opening of the €130 million (SFr196 million) centre.
Greece is proud of its new museum, even though the planning and execution of the project lasted 11 years and the opening was postponed several times.
The Greek culture minister Antonis Samaras has described the Swiss-French architect's museum as a gem. According to Samaras, the ceremony is an event of world importance.
The new three-storey museum at the foot of the Acropolis with its famous Parthenon Temple boasts 25,000 square metres of floor space. The mainly glass and steel building offers more than ten times the exhibition space of the old museum on the Acropolis.
Minimalistic approach
Tschumi decided on a minimalistic and contemporary design, he told the Swiss news agency. "The exhibited sculptures had to be the centre point. I could not allow them to be in competition with the building."
The sculptures reflect the light while the concrete structure absorbs it. "That makes the sculptures clearly visible and very beautiful," Tschumi added.
In the building, the architect had to overcome different technical challenges, for example the exposure to summer heat and the risk of earthquake.
Small black points have been embedded in the glass to reduce the strength of the sunlight and a system previously used in Japan and California has been incorporated to limit the risk of earthquake damage.
The official opening of the museum was originally scheduled for 2004, to coincide with the Olympic Games that took place in Greece that year. But the occasion was postponed several times for different reasons.
During excavations, walls from houses dating back to antiquity were discovered. Later there were problems with local residents as well as long-drawn out legal proceedings and finally more delays were caused by the complicated transport of the delicate exhibits from the old museum to the new.
A dual French-Swiss national with offices in New York and Paris, Tschumi won the museum contract in an international competition which included designs by prominent names such as the United States star architect Daniel Liebeskind.
Parthenon Frieze
Tschumi's idea to create a direct view connection between the hall where the Parthenon Frieze is displayed and the Parthenon on the Acropolis hill itself was a deciding factor in the jury's decision.
The Parthenon Frieze is the crowning glory of the museum. However a large part of the frieze has still not been returned. They were removed in 1806 by Lord Elgin, then British ambassador to the Ottoman empire. To this day 56 of the 96 slabs of the Frieze are still in the British Museum in London.
The British have always argued that there was no suitable storage space for the works in Athens. This is no longer the case, the Greeks believe. And Tschumi assumes that the slabs will be returned to Athens some day.
Until then the missing pieces will appear as blurred holograms or copies in white marble to remind people of the missing originals.
Indeed the high profile of the opening ceremony may exert pressure on Britain to give back the antique Parthenon Frieze at last.
Gaby Ochsenbein, swissinfo.ch (Translated from German by Clare O'Dea)
BERNARD TSCHUMI
Born in Lausanne in 1944.
Completed his degree in architecture at the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in 1969.
Later taught in London, Princeton and New York and has offices in New York and Paris.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York honoured the Swiss-French dual national with a special exhibition in 1994.
Tschumis' most important works include the Parc de la Villette in Paris (1982) and the Blue Tower in Manhattan (2009).
In Switzerland he built premises for the Geneva watch manufacturer Vacheron Constantin (2004). He also produced the Flon train station in Lausanne (2008) and the Cantonal School of Lausanne (2007).
ACROPOLIS
The word Acropolis is a combination of the two Greek words "akros" (over) and "polis" (city).
Most of the buildings that still stand on the Acropolis date from the 2nd to 5th centuries B.C.
The Athena Temple known as the Parthenon is the most famous building on the hill.
The Acropolis in Athens has been a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1986.
According to Unesco, the "Acropolis of Athens and its monuments are universal symbols of the classical spirit and civilization and form the greatest architectural and artistic complex bequeathed by Greek Antiquity to the world".
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swissinfo.html?siteSect=43&sid=10852759&ty=st
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ABC Online
Correspondents Report - Greek marbles could now have Athenian home
[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2008/s2603743.htm]
Correspondents Report - Sunday, 21 June , 2009
Reporter: Helena Smith
Activists, including David Hill, the former managing director of the ABC who heads the Sydney-based Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures, hope the new museum will reinvigorate the campaign to bring back the Elgin marbles - the artworks that have been displayed in the British Museum since Lord Elgin removed them from the Acropolis over 200 years ago.
Helena Smith reports from Athens.
HELENA SMITH: More than 180 years after the declaration of Greek independence and three decades after plans were first put forward, the New Museum of the Acropolis will finally open its doors.
For Greeks at large the $AU220-million museum is a dream come true, and already thousands have rushed to snap up tickets to a building many thought would never get off the ground.
But while the striking glass and cement behemoth is situated at the foot of the Acropolis, is architecturally stupendous and will contain the world's finest collection of antique Greek sculpture, Greeks say without the classical carvings that adorned the Parthenon - until Lord Elgin removed them - it will remain woefully incomplete.
To this end, the museum's top floor facing the Acropolis has been has been purpose-built to display the masterpieces.
For a long time the British Museum argued that Athens had nowhere decent enough to exhibit its Golden Age wonders. But with that argument now crushed by the new museum, the fight to win back the marbles is about to be revived as never before.
And the Greeks are not short of supporters world-wide. In the past five years an international Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures has almost doubled in size, with members in 17 countries joining the Sydney based body.
Speaking exclusively to the ABC, the organisation's president David Hill said he was sure the new museum would play a central role in reviving Greece's push to retrieve the sculptures from the British Museum.
Singling out Australia for the support it has given Greece on the issue, the Greek Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said he had been heartened that political opponents like Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Frazer had put their differences aside to sign up to the body.
"It is," he told the ABC, "indicative of the strength of feeling the marbles have aroused. So many people around the world, and even in Britain, now believe that they should now be back in Greece."
If the Greeks had wanted to make a point that something is missing from their museum, they could not have done it better.
With more than 60 per cent of the ancient sculptor Phidias' monumental frieze on display in London, thanks to Lord Elgin, Athens has had to make do with giant plaster-cast copies, acquired from the British Museum in the 19th century, to narrate the full tale that the carvings depicted of the great Panathenaic Procession.
The whiter-than-white plaster casts stand out like eyesores and have caused controversy before the museum has even opened.
This is Helena Smith in Athens reporting for Correspondents Report.
http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/printfriendly.pl?http://www.abc.net.au/correspondents/content/2008/s2603743.htm
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New Acropolis Museum officially unveiled
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| Visitors walk around the marble statue "Kritios boy" during the inauguration ceremony of the new Acropolis museum in Athens June 20, 2009. |
ATHENS, June 20 (Xinhua) -- The galleries of 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 Acropoliswere officially unveiled here on Saturday.
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.
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| French-Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi visits the new Acropolis museum during the inauguration ceremony in Athens June 20, 2009. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo) |
The third level of the 25,000 square meters museum, offering an unparalleled view of the Parthenon atop the Acropolis a couple of hundred yards away, has been reserved for when the Marbles -- as many Greeks devoutly hope -- return.
Replicas of the sculptures in the British Museum which were taken from Parthenon's frieze some 200 years ago are sitting next to those left in Greece. Visitors from across the world will admire the complete sculptures of the famous Parthenon Temple for the first time.
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| A visitor looks at Caryatid statues during the official opening ceremony of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, June 20, 2009.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo) |
Greek President Karolos Papoulias, Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis as well as heads of states and governments, the President of EU Jose Manuel Barros and the Director-General of UNESCO Koichiro Matsuura attended the opening ceremony.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-06/21/content_11574484.htm
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