Showing results 25 - 36 of 42 for the tag: Dimitrios Pantermalis.

July 27, 2009

Record of iconoclasm cut from video in New Acropolis Museum

Posted at 1:13 pm in Elgin Marbles, Greece Archaeology, New Acropolis Museum

Following their complaints about the depiction or priests damaging sculptures on the Parthenon in a video on show at the New Acropolis Museum, the Greek Orthodox church has been successful in getting these scenes removed from the film.

The original video can still be seen here.

From:
New York Times

Scene Cut From Athens Museum Film After Protests
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 25, 2009

Filed at 5:48 p.m. ET

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — A scene from an animated film shown to visitors at the new Acropolis Museum that depicts Christian priests destroying parts of the Parthenon has been deleted following protests by the Greek Orthodox Church.

The creator of the segment, Greek-born French filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gavras, has demanded that his name be taken off the film credits in protest.
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July 4, 2009

Dimitrios Pantermalis reflects on the New Acropolis Museum

Posted at 9:02 pm in British Museum, Elgin Marbles, New Acropolis Museum

Few people have had such a long running involvement with the New Acropolis Museum project as Professor Dimitrios Pantermalis. Visitors to the construction site of the museum will have regularly seen him, sowing people around & explaining about his plans for the display of artefacts within the building. He has acted as a representative of the government during the course of the building of the museum – an agent making key day to day decisions, so that quick answers could be given rather than referring everything to committees before there could be a response. As any architect knows, a great client is a vital ingredient in creating a great building – anyone who has visited the New Acropolis Museum will agree about its greatness.

From:
Athens Plus

Dimitrios Pandermalis looks back on achievement so far and forward to further projects ahead
FRIDAY, JULY 3, 2009 – PROFILE
From classroom to construction hat: New Acropolis Museum a work in progress
BY CHRISTIAN FLOW

On the corner of his desk, new Acropolis Museum board president Dimitrios Pandermalis keeps an apt symbol of his labors – a replica head of an early Classical statue, wearing a white construction hat.

For the soft-spoken archaeologist, it’s easy to see the appeal of the juxtaposition. Now an emeritus professor, Pandermalis spent decades in the classroom at the University of Thessaloniki before coming to public life, first as a member of Parliament in the mid-90s and then as director of the Organization for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum beginning in 2000. And according to several of his colleagues who spoke to Athens Plus this week, it is precisely his ability to blend the academic and the pragmatic, the theoretical and the project-based, the sculptural eye and the construction-hat mentality that has made him – and the museum whose board he now leads – a success.
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June 25, 2009

A body in London, with its feet in Athens

Posted at 8:51 pm in British Museum, Elgin Marbles, New Acropolis Museum

The Parthenon Marbles are not all in one country. They are not even neatly split between countries. As visitors to the New Acropolis Museum will discover, in many places a single piece of sculpture is split arbitrarily (by how it happened to break when it fell from the building at some point in the past). Is there any way that people can argue that this makes sense? If you had a book & the pages of the story were split between two locations, how many people would try to argue that maintaining this status quo rather than reunifying the fragments of the story was the best thing to do?

From:
Global Post

A breast in London, a foot in Athens
New Acropolis museum puts marble dispute in stark relief.
By Nicole Itano – GlobalPost
Published: June 25, 2009 06:46 ET

ATHENS, Greece — Inside the new Parthenon Gallery, atop Athens’ new Acropolis Museum, streaming sunlight illuminates one of the glories of ancient Greece. The goddess Athena, wrought in marble, leaps from her father Zeus’ head, while white horses gallop across the walls.

These are the Parthenon Marbles as they haven’t been seen in more than two centuries. In the black-glass gallery, which sits in the shadow of the Acropolis with the Parthenon in full view, the sculptures are laid out in order, as they would once have been seen on the famous building itself.
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June 23, 2009

The New Acropolis Museum shows the Parthenon Sculptures in a new light

Posted at 2:11 pm in British Museum, Elgin Marbles, New Acropolis Museum

Few who have been inside the completed New Acropolis Museum would be able to argue that the sculptures could be equally well displayed in any other location outside Athens. Certainly, they may raise other arguments, such as the legalities of ownership, or how the sculptures supposedly form the basis for another institution, but the argument that they are better displayed elsewhere should now be considered irreparably null & void. Nowhere else is it possible to see the sculptures & the building that they were once an integral part of in the same glance. The pattern of light & shadows of the sculptures is replicated, as is the exact original spatial arrangement of them. Only in Athens is it possible to get a tru understanding of the scale & significance of the Parthenon Marbles.

From:
New York Times

Elgin Marble Argument in a New Light
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: June 23, 2009

ATHENS — Not long before the new Acropolis Museum opened last weekend, the writer Christopher Hitchens hailed in this newspaper what he called the death of an argument.

Britain used to say that Athens had no adequate place to put the Elgin Marbles, the more than half of the Parthenon frieze, metopes and pediments that Lord Elgin spirited off when he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire two centuries ago. Since 1816 they have been prizes of the British Museum. Meanwhile, Greeks had to make do with the leftovers, housed in a ramshackle museum built in 1874.
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Greece urges Britain to return Elgin Marbles

Posted at 1:51 pm in British Museum, Elgin Marbles, New Acropolis Museum

More coverage of Greece’s response to statements made by the British Museum following the opening of the New Acropolis Museum.

From:
United Press International

Greece urges Britain to return sculptures
Published: June 22, 2009 at 10:27 AM

ATHENS, Greece, June 22 (UPI) — Greece used the opening of an Acropolis museum to renew its call to Britain to return sculptures taken from Athens’ Parthenon 200 years ago, authorities said.

Dimitris Pandermalis, director of the New Acropolis Museum, at an opening ceremony Saturday told Greek and world dignitaries now the time to rectify what he called an act of barbarism in the sculptures’ removal, the Athens News Agency reported Monday.
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June 22, 2009

The New Acropolis Museum opens to the public

Posted at 1:24 pm in Elgin Marbles, New Acropolis Museum

Following the official opening of the New Acropolis Museum, it is now fully open to the public for the first time. At present, due to high demand all tickets have to be booked in advance, although by the end of the week there will also be some tickets going on sale every day.

From:
Associated Press

Greece’s New Acropolis Museum opens to visitors
1 day ago

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — The new Acropolis Museum opened its gates Sunday to hundreds of visitors eager to explore its vast collection of sculptures and artifacts from ancient Greece.

The museum holds more than 4,000 ancient works, including some of the best surviving classical sculptures that once adorned the Acropolis.
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June 20, 2009

A new home for the Parthenon Marbles

Posted at 8:08 pm in British Museum, Elgin Marbles, New Acropolis Museum

Greece has built the New Acropolis Museum to re-house artefacts that there was no space for in the old museum on the Acropolis itself. It is no secret though that the key reason for the museum was to help secure the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum.

From:
The Australian

Athens builds a home for Parthenon’s marbles
Helen Vatsikopoulos | June 20, 2009

THE New Acropolis Museum in Athens will never become a landmark building. It will not be like Joern Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, its towering tiled sails reaching over the harbour, or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, with colossal steel whorls dominating the landscape.

But the city of Athens already has such a building, Phidias’s Parthenon. He designed it in the mid-5th century BC, funded by a hefty stimulus package to rebuild the archaic temples destroyed by the Persians; it’s still standing. The temple atop the Acropolis hill overlooking central Athens survived virtually unscathed for almost 2000 years, only to suffer its worst damage in the past 400: Venetian cannon balls, Ottoman dynamite, a bad restoration and acid rain have all taken their toll, along with an act of vandalism perpetrated by one man, a British diplomat. More on Lord Elgin later.
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June 19, 2009

The New Acropolis Museum is ready for the reunification of the Elgin Marbles

Posted at 1:01 pm in British Museum, Elgin Marbles, New Acropolis Museum

The opening of the New Acropolis Museum is proceeding towards the main event on 20th June. Although Greece is waiting until after the opening before announcing any new initiatives for the return of the Parthenon Sculptures, most press reports are still (rightly) observing that the buildings raison d’etre is the creation of a new home for the marbles.

From:
Xinhua

New Acropolis Museum to showcase complete Parthenon sculptures
2009-06-19 12:20:41
by Liang Yeqian

ATHENS, June 19 (Xinhua) — Visitors from across the world will admire the complete sculptures of the famous Parthenon Temple for the first time when the new Acropolis Museum officially opens on June 20.

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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June 18, 2009

The new home for the Parthenon Marbles

Posted at 1:26 pm in Acropolis, British Museum, Elgin Marbles, New Acropolis Museum

Christopher Hitchens writes about the reasons why the New Acropolis Museum will be the most suitable location for the display of all surviving fragments of the Parthenon Sculptures.

From:
New York Times

Op-Ed Contributor
A Home for the Marbles
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Published: June 18, 2009

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.
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June 16, 2009

The goal of having the best museum in the world

Posted at 12:41 pm in British Museum, Elgin Marbles, New Acropolis Museum

For Dimitrios Pantermalis who has overseen the New Acropolis Museum project, his goal has been simple – to have the best museum in the world. Whether or not it will truly be the best is a hard question to judge, but there can be littel disputing that it will be the best museum in which to display the sculptures from the Parthenon & Acropolis monuments.

From:
Guardian

‘Our goal is to have the best museum in the world’
Ancient Athens lies at the root of western culture, yet the battles over the marbles that once adorned the Parthenon have been far from civilised. Could the city’s new Acropolis Museum offer a fresh beginning? Stephen Moss gets an exclusive preview
Stephen Moss
The Guardian, Tuesday 16 June 2009

“Forgive me, it is crazy,” says Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis, president of the Organisation for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum, explaining why he has kept me waiting for almost half an hour in the museum’s spacious reception. Pandermalis is the elderly, dignified archaeologist at the centre of the latest – and the Greek government hopes concluding – chapter in the saga of the Parthenon/Elgin Marbles, and the pressure is beginning to tell. “I hate all this publicity,” he says. “This is not my job, but I have to manage it.”

Beware Greeks bearing gifts. An adage I should have borne in mind before accepting an invitation to be the first journalist to be allowed to see the museum’s completed galleries, and the first person to photograph the inside of the airy glass box at the top of the museum which will house the part of the Parthenon Marbles held by the Greeks. This is a rare privilege, but it also means being drawn into the seemingly endless controversy that has raged since Lord Byron savaged the seventh earl of Elgin for removing large chunks of the statuary from the Parthenon in the first decade of the 19th century – a cache that ended up in the British Museum a decade later and has been a source of resentment in Greece ever since. The Greeks may hope their splendid new museum – which has been almost 40 years in the planning (twice as long as it took for their ancient forebears to build the Parthenon) and cost €130m – will bring the issue to a head, but the portents are not good.
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June 15, 2009

Greek Prime Minister briefed ahead of New Acropolis Museum opening

Posted at 9:30 pm in New Acropolis Museum

Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis was today briefed on the final preparations for the opening of the New Acropolis Museum which will begin from Wednesday culminating in the main opening ceremony on Saturday.

From:
Athens News Agency

06/15/2009
PM briefed on New Acropolis Museum opening

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis on Monday had a meeting with Culture Minister Antonis Samaras and the head of the organisation for construction of the New Acropolis Museum, Prof. Dimitris Pandermalis, who briefed him on the progress of preparations for the official opening of the New Acropolis Museum on Saturday.

“We have carried out all the preparations required and we briefed the prime minister and I am sure that everything will go well on Saturday,” Samaras told reporters as he emerged from the premier’s offices in Maximos Mansion.
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June 7, 2009

The New Acropolis Museum is almost open

Posted at 9:36 pm in Elgin Marbles, New Acropolis Museum

After eight years of construction, The New Acropolis Museum is now only days away from opening.

From:
GRReporter

All is set for the opening of the New Acropolis museum
05 June 2009 :: 01:07:14
Maria Spassova

A frenzy of preparations are taking place in Athens where in two weeks the new Acropolis museum is going to have its inauguration. There haven’t been so many VIPs visiting and so much media attention centered on the Greek capital since the Olympic games in 2004. The official opening ceremony will take place on June 20, Saturday, at 8:00 PM. 200 persons of highest standing, including representatives of the world political, cultural and academic elite, will be the guests of honor at the ceremony, directed by Atina Tsangari, a name we know from the Summer Olympics in 2004. The event will include cutting the ribbon, a tour around the museum and a cocktail, after which the officials will participate in a sea-row around the Saronic Gulf on a luxury private jet.
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