ATHENS, Greece — Thousands of ancient artifacts from the Acropolis never seen by the public will be showcased at a landmark new Athens museum expected to open next year, Greek officials say.

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

If the ancient Greeks sold kitschy postcards to tourists 2,000 years ago, they would have depicted much different views of the popular sites that visitors flock to today.

Archaeologists say many of the stony ruins looked much different in their prime. Many were brightly painted in hues that have faded with time and, in some cases, with forced removal.

The Parthenon in Athens was once covered in colorful splashes of paint, for example.

It has long been known that the formidable marble temple, which sits atop the capital city’s Acropolis citadel, had been painted. New tests, performed by Greek archaeologist and chemical engineer Evi Papakonstantinou-Zioti, confirm the use of brilliant shades of red, blue and green.

Traces of the colors were found during a laser cleaning done as part of ongoing restorations to the temple, built in 432 B.C. Simple weathering caused the colors to fade over time, said Sara Orel, associate professor of art history at Missouri’s Truman University.

“Weathering through the bleaching of the sun, blowing of the sand, etc., and more modern pollution-caused damage,” are the major culprits, Orel told LiveScience. She sees this through much of Egypt, where the carved designs on most ancient buildings were painted to make them stand out more prominently against lighter stone. Today those colors are barely visible.

One renowned institution comes under fire for how it may have helped the Parthenon’s aging process along.

Some of the Parthenon’s most intricate carvings now reside in a specially-built wing of the British Museum in London. The Elgin Marbles, as they’re jointly dubbed, may have been stripped of some of their remaining color for aesthetic purposes when they arrived in London in the early 19th-century and again over subsequent cleanings, experts say.

One clean-up in the 1930s was particularly devastating. A historian at Cambridge University claims museum representatives used steel wool and chisels for the task—hardly the stuff of sophisticated conservation efforts employed today. The thinking is that the museum reps were operating under the same assumption held by most of the modern public: that the sculptures were originally a bright white.

“Michelangelo’s sculpture wasn’t painted, and great classical sculpture was thought not to be either, so they improved the stuff,” Orel explained. “At the time it was not quite the horrific thought that we would make it now.”

Ian Jenkins, writing in a paper released by the British Museum in 2001, stops short of saying the mistakes in the 1930s were responsible for turning the Elgin Marbles from a Technicolor spectacle into the blander grey-white collection currently on display, however.

“I estimate that when the sculptures entered the Museum, less than 20 percent of their overall surface retained its coating, of which in the 1930s about half was removed,” Jenkins writes. “But natural weathering is by far the single most important factor determining the surface and color of the sculptures as we see them today.”

ATHENS (Reuters) - After years of delays, legal wrangles and cost overruns, Greece hopes to open its Acropolis Museum by the end of 2007, Culture Minister George Voulgarakis said on Tuesday.

“It is our ambition that by 2007 the museum will be open to visitors,” he told journalists after touring the half-finished building near the ancient hilltop temples of the Acropolis.

Greece had hoped to open the museum before the 2004 Olympics to push its claim for the return of the 5th-century BC Parthenon marbles, widely known as the Elgin marbles, from the British Museum.

But after decades on the drawing board, the museum is now three years behind schedule and, at a projected final cost of 129 million euros ($156.6 million), 25 percent over budget.

Construction was held up partly by the discovery of early Christian era ruins on the site. Another delay was caused by residents who challenged the construction of the museum, citing zoning laws in the city center.

The building itself has faced engineering challenges. Because of the risk of earthquakes, the four-story museum is built on 94 shock absorbing supports to allow it to sway during tremors.

Once it is finished, the museum will house artifacts from the temples of the Acropolis, including the Parthenon, as well as serving as a hoped-for future home for the disputed Elgin marbles.

Since independence in 1832, Greece has pressed Britain to return the sculpted blocks of the frieze that were cut from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which occupied Greece at the time.

The frieze depicts a procession of horses and people through Athens during a festival and is a masterpiece of ancient Greece.

A brochure for the new Acropolis museum says “nearly half of the frieze is currently at the British Museum in London and its restitution is the object of major political struggles.”

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