The New Acropolis Museum is a building that has been beset by many delays, but since it has opened, many people have noticed that it has already started to transform the surrounding area. It is only the first prong of attack however, & now that it is completed it leaves the route opening for concerted efforts by Greece to secure the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum.

From:
Guardian

The battle for the Parthenon marbles
Following the success of the newly opened Acropolis Museum, Greek officials are more determined than ever to retrieve their missing heritage. Helena Smith reports from Athens
Tuesday 30 June 2009 17.43 BST

For as long as most Athenians can remember, the intersection of Makriyianni and Dionysiou Areopagitou streets was a nondescript place, the preserve of those bent on illicitly parking their cars on the narrow alleys of the historic Plaka district.

Nine days after the opening of the New Acropolis Museum, this little slice of Athens at the foot of the Acropolis rock is a place transformed. Where vehicles once clogged the streets, there are street cafes, people and performance artists – Greeks such as Anita Papachristou who, like a modern-day pilgrim, makes a point of dropping in to behold the behemoth that looks set to become Greece’s 21st-century shrine. “We waited for it long enough,” she says, looking up at the honey-coloured Parthenon marble, illuminated along the length and breadth of the museum’s upper floor. “And now that it’s here, I can say it’s been worth waiting for.”
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The Guardian has a poll on their website on whether the Elgin Marbles should be reunited now that the New Acropolis Museum is opened.

Place your vote their as soon as possible as voting closes in a few days.

Currently the vote stands at a massive 94.7% in favour of the sculptures being returned.

Vote here.

From:
The Guardian

Wednesday 24 June 2009 09.56 BST
Is it time to return the Parthenon Marbles?

The Greek minister of culture claims that public opinion in the UK favours the return of the Parthenon Marbles. Is he right?

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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More coverage of Greece’s statements that rejected any potential loan deal on the Elgin Marbles if the likely preconditions from the British Museum were part of the package.

From:
The Guardian

Greek fury at Elgin marbles ‘loan deal’
Queen turns down invitation to opening of major new museum in Athens built to house Acropolis treasures
Helena Smith, Athens
The Observer, Sunday 14 June 2009

A bitter new row over ownership of the Elgin marbles has erupted, threatening to eclipse the inauguration this week of a major new museum in Athens designed to house the contested masterpieces.

Just days before the opening of the €130m (£110m) New Acropolis Museum, officials in Athens and London were this weekend engaging in barbed exchanges over the classical treasures.
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The British Museum is celebrating its two 250th birthday. Maybe this should be seen as the ideal point for making a grand gesture regarding the disputed artefacts in their collection. The world has changed a lot since the founding of the museum – perhaps now, the museum can re-invent itself to once again lead the way in the world rather than dragging its heels whenever the issue of restitution is raised.

From:
The Times

January 15, 2009
It’s 1759 and all that … or the history you never learnt at school
Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent

[...]

One of the salient achievements of an extraordinary year will be celebrated at the British Museum, which opened 250 years ago today. The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew were also new in 1759.
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Coverage of the talk at RIBA on the New Acropolis Museum. Almost everyone who has seen it is impressed by the museum itself – will this be enough to make the British Museum enter into serious negotiations with Greece on the Marbles?

From:
The Guardian

The New Acropolis Museum: A home fit for the Elgin Marbles?
The soon-to-open museum for the Acropolis sculptures looks fantastic. But will it convince the British Museum to send the Parthenon frieze home?

Last night the president, Dimitrios Pandermalis, and the architect, Bernard Tschumi, of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens were in London to present their plans for the building, which opens sometime in early spring. They gave a clear sense of this impressive-looking museum, which is built in the shadow of the Parthenon atop ruins of late-antique buildings (which can be perceived through the glass floors of the museum’s ground floor). The plan echoes that of the Acropolis itself – the visitor will ascend through the building as if climbing the steep slopes of the hill, passing through halls filled with sculpture from the archaic temple to Athene, before reaching the very apex, where the Parthenon sculptures themselves will be displayed in a large glass-walled hall from which visitors will be able to enjoy wonderful views of Pheidias’s great temple.
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More coverage on the return of a religious icon to Greece – after a thirty year battle. As expected, the British Museum feels the need to disassociate any return from the Elgin Marbles debate.

From:
The Guardian

After 30 years, Greece welcomes back stolen icon
Detective work and British judges close case of missing Byzantine masterpiece
Helena Smith in Athens
guardian.co.uk, Thursday November 20 2008 00.01 GMT
The Guardian, Thursday November 20 2008

A stolen icon, considered one of the finest examples of Byzantine art, was back in Greece yesterday after decades of police work, diplomacy and, finally, a key ruling by the high court in London.

The recovery of the piece, believed to have been painted by a master iconographer in the 14th century and depicting the removal of Christ’s body from the cross, came 30 years after it was stolen from a monastery in northern Greece.
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It seems that other than being returned to their original locations, looted artefacts suffer one of three fates – they are either kept in museums with no chance of return, they are lost forever, or they enter private hands & are exchanged between collections on occasion – a tantalising flash of stolen property in front of the original owners eyes. If it is purchased back by the original owners at this point, then it in some way validates the action of looting – on the other hand, if they do not buy it, then they are no closer to regaining possession & in most cases someone else makes a profit.

This case is of course made more interesting the looting was done by another Lord Elgin – the son of the one who took the Marbles from Athens.

From:
The Guardian

Chinese fury at sale of plundered treasures
* Tania Branigan in Beijing
* The Guardian,
* Monday November 3 2008

The row spans two continents and more than 140 years. But it has boiled up again following the involvement of a fashion legend and an eminent auction house.

Chinese officials are fuming at plans to sell national treasures from an imperial palace sacked and burned by British and French forces during the second opium war. One described the staggering estimated price of the objects – around £9m each – as “robbery”.
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The Greek Neo-pagans may have tenuous connection to the ancient Greeks. Their actions are however drawing a lot of media attention & on the back of this, more coverage is being given to the imminently opening New Acropolis Museum that it might not otherwise have received.

The followers of Ellinais object to the removal of sculptures from the Parthenon to preserve them from the elements – unfortunately though this has long been considered a necessary action by almost all archaeologists if they are to be preserved for future generations to see them.

More interestingly though, this article reveals information from a recent poll by Ipsos Mori, which shows that 69% of people in Britain believe that the Parthenon Marbles should be returned to Greece. This conveniently disproves the view put forward by the British Museum in a National Geographic film on the Elgin Marbles, which suggested that old polls were invalid because they were taken too long ago & there was no proof that support for reunification had been maintained over that time.

From:
Guardian

Greece: Pagans call on Athena to protect the Acropolis
Helena Smith in Athens
The Guardian,
Monday September 1 2008

Thrusting their arms skywards and chanting Orphic hymns, Greek pagans yesterday made a comeback at the Acropolis as they added their voices to protests against the imminent inauguration of the New Acropolis Museum.

Ignoring a sudden rainstorm and irate officials, white-clad worshippers gathered before Greece’s most sacred site and invoked Athena, the goddess of wisdom, to protect sculptures taken from the temples to the new museum. It was the first time in nearly 2,000 years that pagans had held a religious ceremony on the site.
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The New Acropolis Museum in Athens is due to open imminently. Unfortunately though, there is still no sign of its star exhibits being there for the opening.

From:
Guardian

Acropolis now
Athens’s new museum is spectacular, even without its star exhibits. Kevin Rushby gets a sneak preview
Kevin Rushby, The Guardian, Saturday July 26 2008

Walking through bright sunshine and crowds of tourists in an Athenian street, I glanced down and read the publicity blurb in my hand. The story was there, contained in just a few words: “Museum mission: to house all the surviving antiquities from the Acropolis within a single museum of international stature.” Actually the entire story is distilled into one word: ALL. But they might have added that it has been a 207-year mission to return the so-called Elgin Marbles – the first being cut down from the Parthenon on July 31, 1801.

A little further up the road and both buildings are in sight: to my right, rising from a skirt of trees, is the knobbly hill of the Acropolis, crowned by the Parthenon; to my left, behind some low buildings, is the New Acropolis Museum. The international stature of the Parthenon requires no words, but does this new museum live up to the lofty ambition? And the big question: does it have the requisite stature even when ALL the antiquities are not present – because half of them are in London?
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Andrew Dismore, a British MP is launching a new campaign this week for a change in the law that would allow major museums in the UK (such as the British Museum) to legally deaccession artefacts from their collections if they desired. The current impetus for this stems from the Feldmann case in 2005, although the implications affect many other cases too. Currently, the British Museum claims that even if they wanted to return the Elgin Marbles, the anti-deaccessioning clauses in their charter would prevent them from doing so.

From:
Totally Jewish

‘Change Law So Looted Art Can Be Returned’
by Simon Williams – Thursday 24th July 2008

Launching a new campaign this week, a Labour politician set his sights on changing the law to enable national museums and galleries whose collections include artworks stolen by the Nazis to return them to their rightful owners.

Hendon MP Andrew Dismore, who several years ago was among those who campaigned successfully for the establishment of the spoliation panel to help resolve disputes over stolen artefacts, is hoping that a drive which began recently with a series of parliamentary questions will conclude with new legislation later this year.
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The British Museum’s Public Relations department have clearly been successful in securing various op-ed journalists to write about how amazing their institution is & will continue to be.

A response by Dr Kwame Opoku follows after the first article.

From:
The Guardian

How one cultural vision has lessons for the whole world
The British Museum is now our top attraction. If only others would shrug off their deadening ways and follow its lead
Tristram Hunt
The Observer,
Sunday July 6, 2008

According to its director, Neil MacGregor, the monstrous iron gates of the British Museum have only twice in its history had to be closed to the public. The first time was in 1848, for fear of angry Chartist radicals. And the second was earlier this year, as thousands queued for the museum’s Terracotta Army exhibition.

But boast he might as last week the British Museum was named the nation’s top visitor attraction – thrashing Tate Modern, Alton Towers, and even Madame Tussauds. Instead of Nemesis roller coasters and Will Smith waxworks, tourists and Brits alike clearly preferred the Great Court, Egyptian galleries, and blockbuster exhibitions on show at Great Russell Street. And all the signs are that this month’s Emperor Hadrian exhibition will draw even greater numbers.
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