The New Acropolis Museum was redesigned specifically to avoid creating problems with the archaeological site that it sits over. Many people in Greece (I suspect largely for political reasons) are continuing to raise objections to it, seemingly glossing over everything that it does to avoid damaging the site & instead talking about the potential for destruction. The reality is than anywhere you build in central Athens, you will be on archaeological remains. The building surrounding the Acropolis Museum doubtless damaged large areas of remains when they themselves were built. Far more than most buildings in Greece, this one is deliberately designed around the ruins that it shares the plot of land with, yet people continue to obstruct it construction. Surely though, looking at it pragmatically, it is better to have the building constructed as it is proposed, than to have no building at all? If the objections carry on in this way, a great opportunity for Greece will end up being lost.

From:
Washington Post

Marbles Lost and Found
In the Parthenon’s Shadow, an Old Grievance Gets Put on a Pedestal
By Kirstin Downey Grimsley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 29, 2002; Page C01

ATHENS — A $100 million museum being built here in hopes of shaming the British government into giving back sculptures taken two centuries ago is creating controversy in Greece, where a growing number of critics say the government is damaging other antiquities in a rush to make the museum ready in time for the 2004 Olympics.

They charge that excavation at the museum’s site at the foot of the great Acropolis citadel has uncovered substantial Roman, Byzantine and Stone Age ruins that provide vivid archaeological snapshots of ancient Athens, and that development should be delayed while the remains are studied.
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Mark Steel writes about the Parthenon Marbles in his own inimitable way – with his tongue planted very firmly in his cheek. As always though, there is a lot of truth in what he says.

From:
Independent

24 January 2002 00:45 GMT
Mark Steel: Lord Elgin was only trying to help the Greeks
‘They should retaliate by running off with the dome of St Paul’s and placing it upside down in Athens’
17 January 2002

Whenever the British reject a plea from the Greeks for the return of the Elgin Marbles, we sound like a small-town petty criminal making an excuse for being caught with a van full of stolen bacon. They will “never” be returned to Greece, it was announced this week, because we can look after them better than the Greeks. The full original statement probably went: “We haven’t nicked them or nothing, we’re just looking after them, ‘cos if they were left in Greece, they’d melt with all that sun. And olive oil brings statues out in blotches, apparently.”

This is similar to Lord Elgin’s original argument, that he was swiping the sculptures to protect them from the Ottoman Empire. Since then, we’ve given them nothing but loving care, if you exclude incidents such as the time in 1938 when someone decided they weren’t white enough, and scraped the top from almost the entire collection with wire wool. I suppose the Greeks are lucky that, in the 1970s, no one decided to paint red hats on the statues, stick fishing rods in their arms and stick them in a garden next to a pond. Or cover the whole collection in formica, pebble-dash them and hang window-boxes full of pansies from the water carriers. Or, in the 1980s, try to strip them back to the original wood.
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