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. Gods, heroes and mortals stepped off their plinths into the evening sky of Athens yesterday, during the lavish launch of the new Acropolis Museum.
Designed by Bernard Tschumi and Mihalis Fotiadis, 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. 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.
The New Acropolis Museum
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 opening ceremony was attended by some 400 guests, including foreign heads of state.
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. In the early 19th century, 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.
Official site: The New Acropolis Museum
Images of Greece and the Acropolis: Kevrekidis Photography
Kevrekidis Photography – Weblog 2009
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