Posted Sun Apr 13, 2008 7:13pm AEST

A senior Greek archaeologist has warned that the last original sculptures still adorning the Parthenon, Athens’ iconic ancient temple, face a major pollution threat and must be removed to a museum.

“There are still 17 original metopes [sculpted plaques] which must be protected because they can no longer endure atmospheric conditions,” Acropolis site supervisor Alexandros Mantis said on Friday.

Mr Mantis has proposed that the endangered sculptures be replaced by replicas and kept safe in a new museum located below the Acropolis that is scheduled to open in September.

He singled out 14 plaques on the Parthenon’s western facade which are in a “pitiful” condition, plus two more on the northern side.

One of them is the so-called “Annunciation” plaque featuring two goddesses, which was spared by early Christians when the temple was turned into a church around 600 AD.

Athens’ most recognisable landmark and part of the ancient Acropolis citadel overlooking the city, the Parthenon dates back to the golden age of Athenian democracy which began in the fifth century BC

Few sculptures dating from the Acropolis’ creation are still on-site, having been gradually removed by Greek archaeologists in the last 30 years during restoration works.

The famous Caryatids, statues of young women that acted as pillars to the Erechtheion temple, were themselves removed in 1979.

The issue was discussed last week by the Greek archaeological council (KAS), the influential 34-member state body that advises the culture ministry on heritage issues.

But the council is frequently split and this case was no exception.

“Mr Mantis has stated his position but the archaeological council has not ruled on the issue,” Maria Ioannidou, the archaeologist heading the Acropolis restoration project (YSMA), said.

“A relevant study must be carried out and an international conference must be held on the issue to reach a decision.”

The culture ministry’s head of ancient monument restoration, Dimosthenis Giraud, also advised caution.

“A detailed study of the issue is necessary,” he said.

Criticisms

Sceptics say that removing the Parthenon’s last original sculptures would strike a jarring note with hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the monument every year.

There is also debate over how the move will affect Greece’s case with the British Museum for the return of the Parthenon Marbles, the priceless friezes removed in the early 19th century by Lord Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire which ruled Greece at the time.

The British have long accused Greek authorities of taking poor care of the vulnerable monument that was exposed to decades of air pollution.

Mr Mantis insists that protecting the sculptures will strengthen Greece’s case to have the Parthenon Marbles repatriated from London.

“We must protect our heritage at all costs,” he said.

A total of 92 metopes once adorned the Parthenon’s outer Doric frieze, the oldest sculptures on the temple dedicated to Athens’ patron goddess Athena.

Depicting scenes of battle between gods and giants, men facing centaurs and Amazons, and the Trojan War, most of them are now nearly unrecognisable.

In addition to the changes wrought on the temple when it was turned into a church, it was badly damaged during a Venetian siege in 1687 when a cannon ball exploded in the Turkish powder magazine stored inside the Parthenon.

- AFP

4,500 antiquities from the Acropolis will be moved by cranes to the new museum. Photograph: Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

A collective gasp filled the air early yesterday as a blue crate containing a 2.5-tonne slab of marble universally viewed as one of the most important works of antiquity, was hoisted by a giant crane from the Acropolis. For those who had come to watch, this was history in the making, the first sculpture to officially leave the ancient citadel since Phidias carved the artworks, 2,500 years ago.

The moment, heavy in symbolism, was not lost on Greece’s culture minister, Michalis Liapis. “For the first time, after 25 centuries, the sculptures are being transferred to the new Acropolis museum. It is awe-inspiring and deeply moving,” he said after witnessing the metal crate make the 400-yard journey to the spectacular cement and glass building that will be the artworks’ new home. “It naturally raises our demand for the reunification of the Parthenon marbles”

Not since work began on the £94m new museum has a single event injected such fervour into the debate over the future of the world’s most famous piece of classical statuary - the 160-metre long strip of marble depicting the great Panathenaic procession which adorned the Parthenon until Lord Elgin removed and sold half of it to the British Museum, nearly 200 years ago.

Yesterday’s meticulously choreographed operation will be repeated 153 times during the coming months as an estimated 4,500 antiquities are moved from the Acropolis to the new museum.

After more than three decades of preparation, procrastination and acrimonious debate, the museum is nearing completion and is expected to open next year. Nearly 25 years after the Greek government launched its campaign for the return of the marbles from the British Museum, the 14,000 square metre building will be the ultimate propaganda tool.

Designed by the Swiss-American architect Bernard Tschumi, and co-sponsored by the EU, the museum, it is hoped. will finally do away with the argument that modern Greece is incapable of properly housing the treasures of its golden age.

“It is not just that this is the first time that first-class masterpieces of classical art has ever been moved from the site,” said Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis, the eminent archaeologist who has overseen the construction of the museum since 1997. “Symbolically, the airlift marks the starting point of the functioning of the new Acropolis museum, because it will henceforth acquire its context.”

It is not just that the museum is built at the foot of the iconic work of art. With the reproduction in its upper gallery of the exact dimensions of the Parthenon temple, campaigners say that the building allows the marbles to be represented in their original configuration and context, in a way that could never be done in the British Museum. “It is one of the most significant buildings in Greece for the last 2,000 years,” said David Hill, who presides over the International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures. “It leaves the Greeks in a position where they can present the surviving Parthenon sculptures in a much more meaningful and better way than the British Museum could ever do.”

At least half of the antiquities that will be put on display in the new three-tiered building have not been seen for a very long time. “For years they’ve been in storerooms, because the old Acropolis museum was too small to exhibit them. The public don’t know they exist,” said Alexandros Mantis, the archaeologist who heads the world heritage monument, told the Guardian. “This moment is a dream come true. We’ve waited for this museum for so long I almost can’t believe it’s happening.”

But it the building’s emphasis on loss - the absence of the 88 sculptures exhibited in London - that gives it a poignancy few other museums have. In place of the missing Elgin marbles, officials have decided to hang plastercasts made from the originals in the British Museum, copies that will be covered with wire mesh veils.

“My hope is that one day the marbles will be returned and people can see them reunited, in one place,” Mr Tschumi said. “The concept was to restore the continuity of the narrative. The sculptures were never a single object, they told a story. This way visitors will see the sculptures in their narrative sequence and will ask whether they should be back in Athens.”

All polls, for the past decade, have shown that the British public wants the marbles back in Greece. But the British Museum has refused to be drawn into the debate, saying that the display in London allows “complementary stories to be told about them.”

Attending the inaugural move yesterday, the British ambassador to Athens, Simon Gass, said: “It’s a very impressive museum, but I can’t say much more than that.”

Backstory

The transfer is expected to take up to three months, with four crates of artworks being transferred every day. Greeks hope that the new museum will boost their campaign, launched by the late actress Melina Mercouri in the early 1980s, for the return of the Elgin marbles, above. They were removed from the temples in 1801 by Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin. He was subsequently vilified by Lord Byron in the poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

ATHENS, GREECE - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton waves to tourists in front of Parthenon temple during a visit to the Acropolis hill on October 6, 2007 in Athens, Greece. Clinton is in Greece on a personal visit as part of his European tour. (Photo by Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)

ParthenonTemple.com Staff.

In one example, the Republic of Iran just entered the fray as an unlikely ally alongside the University of Chicago in the latest landmark artifact case, disputing the ownership of 2,500-year-old Persian tablets an Illinois judge had recently ordered to be seized from the university’s museum and auctioned off for profit.

Iran is now trying to block the auction, meant to help pay for damages owed by the country to American victims of a 1997 suicide bombing in Israel, according to court documents. An attorney in that case maintained the tablets should be liquidated as assets of the Republic of Iran in the United States, despite their scholarly value.

“A lawyer representing Iran is in court arguing that the tablets belong to them,” said William Harms, a spokesperson for the University of Chicago, which has always maintained that the tablets are the cultural property of Iran.

The University of Chicago has held the tablets on permanent loan since their discovery in the 1930s. When they were found, “it made sense at the time to bring the tablets here,” Harms told LiveScience, noting that the few scholars who could read the script marked on them were located in Chicago.

With the potential auction of the tablets inciting Iran to get them back within its own borders, the University of Chicago stands to lose the artifacts regardless of the outcome.

Flurry of debates - The Iran controversy is just one of a recent flurry of debates over cultural property that has museums trying to untangle the complicated webs of how their collections were procured.

Italy and Greece have been especially vehement about reacquiring lost heritage they say was taken across their borders illegally.

On July 10, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles agreed to return to Greece two objects the Hellenic Republic Ministry of Culture claimed were likely stolen after their excavation and sold privately. After reviewing the route the antiquities took in getting there, the museum felt it was appropriate that the objects be given back, it said in a statement.

New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed to a similar deal in February, announcing the return of six objects to Italy.

“This is the appropriate solution to a complex problem, which redresses past improprieties in the acquisitions process,” said museum director Philippe de Montebello in a press release.

‘Criminal and sleazy’ - Because they often buy artifacts from private collections, museums are far from immune to the trafficking of goods looted from archaeological sites, says Ellen Herscher of the American Association of Museums.

“As long as the object comes to you from some wealthy collector who is very respectable and drives a nice car, it’s easy to dissociate and think, Oh, here’s this object that needs a home,” Herscher wrote in a recent edition of the journal Archaeology. “And you can just ignore the whole chain of events that goes back to really criminal and sleazy kinds of activities. There’s a denial of the fact that by taking or buying that object, you’re stimulating the looting of sites.”

One fight Greece likely won’t win anytime soon is its dispute with London over the Elgin Marbles—chunks from the facade of the Parthenon in Athens which Greece claims were stolen in the early 1800s. Officials there have been calling for their return from the British Museum for more than a century, but the museum maintains the artifacts were obtained lawfully and is adamant about keeping them in London.

© 2006 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

Greece: Secrets of the Past is a cannily conceived big-screen experience.

For a host of reasons, not least of which the expense of their production and limited exhibition opportunities, films made in the big-screen Imax format are invariably crusty documentaries invested with educational values.

Rather than the typical Imax-film destination - Egyptian mummies, Mount Everest, space exploration - veteran big-screen director and producer Greg MacGillivray travels back to ancient Greece, to the volcanic eruption that buried Santorini and the golden age of Greek civilisation, in his latest venture.

Part history lesson, part travelogue, part proclamation of Greek pride, this is a cannily conceived big-screen experience, complete with postcard-perfect vistas of Santorini and the Mediterranean, and pulse-quickening volcanic eruption.

The story’s coathanger is the avuncular Christos Doumas, an archaeological detective and guide to the mystery of Santorini - the town Akrotiri was buried beneath volcanic ash, yet unlike Pompeii no human remains have been uncovered.

Though the link between the events of Santorini and the birth of Greek civilisation some 1000 years later is at best flimsy, at worst gratuitous, the second half of the film takes us into the money shot - a recreation of the Parthenon as it might have looked, complete with its statue of Athena and bold frieze.

As history lesson, Greece: Secrets of the Past, offers as much depth and insight as something you might read on a breakfast cereal box with its cribbed recitations about the invention of democracy and philosophy.

It fares infinitely better as spectacle. And if it inspires other Imax film-makers to steer clear of the old chalk-and-talk methods and subjects, that might not be a bad thing.

Paul Kalina, Reviewer

Haralambos Bouras, the president of the Conservation of Acropolis Monuments (YSMA), said that many attempts were made in 2005 to push ahead with improvements to the country’s most famous landmark despite new obstacles arising.

“The year 2005 was one of great effort and intense work. There was some disbelief as far as the programming of the restoration work is concerned,” he said.

“Once this was overcome, emphasis was put on the difficult work required on the Parthenon’s northern colonnade,” he added.

The Parthenon, the Temple of Athena Nike and the huge Propylaea gates have suffered from decades of exposure to the notorious pollution in Athens and have suffered substantial damage due to failed restoration attempts earlier this century.

However, new challenges in this massive restoration project continually come to the fore, sources said.

Problems on the Acropolis’ periphery walls are creating delays, according to Bouras, who noted in YSMA’s annual report that “it is a complicated project because a large part of the ancient walls have been covered by a second wall built after 1715 while another part had collapsed and has since been rebuilt.”

Other outstanding matters still to be addressed include the inscriptions which remain in the open air, as no plans have been finalized as to where they are to be moved and protected.

Additionally, work on the Temple of Athena Nike is proving to be very time-consuming as two extra restoration techniques have now been called for.

The overall Acropolis restoration — which includes work on the Parthenon and Athena Nike temples — is expected to finish in 2020 at a cost of about 70 million euros.

Kathimerini / Greece

Copyright 2006 Vail Daily / Vail, Colorado.

The exhibition area will contain more than 4,000 works — 10 times the number currently on display at a cramped museum on the Acropolis. Some have been kept in storage for decades.

“We are talking about masterpieces that have never been seen,” said senior project official Nikos Damalitis.

These will include bronze and pottery artifacts from the slopes of the fortified hill, while all the 2,500-year-old Parthenon sculptures in Greek possession will be displayed in their original positions on a full-size model of the temple.

Missing will be the Elgin Marbles — works removed from the Parthenon 200 years ago and now in London’s British Museum — for whose return Greece has lobbied long and unsuccessfully.

Friday, March 31, 2006 / The Associated Press