The Firman was an Ottoman legal document issued to Lord Elgin. It only survives in translation, but is used as the basis of proving the supposed legality of Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon Sculptures from Athens. A historian who has researched this document & other similar documents is now casting doubt over whether the firman actually gave Elgin the permissions that were claimed.

From:
The Times

August 29, 2008
Legality of Earl of Elgin’s acquisition challenged by scholar
Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

The new Acropolis Museum may prove to be the most lavishly appointed white elephant in history. Nothing will change the view of the British Government that the intended centrepiece, the magnificently sculpted Elgin Marbles, must remain permanently in the British Museum.

Not that the museum will be empty. There will be 4,000 exhibits including the remaining Parthenon sculptures. But the crown jewels, the 247ft of the original 524ft frieze, 15 of 92 metopes and 17 figures from the pediments, all dating to the 5th century BC, will remain 1,500 miles away in London.
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The Parthenon Gallery is in every sense the high point of a visit to the New Acropolis Museum. Even journalists who have initially been against the whole concept of the museum have come away awed by its creation of a suitable space for the reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures.

From:
The Times

August 28, 2008
Athens welcomes the ghost of Phidias to new rooftop gallery
Marcus Binney, Architecture Correspondent

The new rooftop gallery built to display the Parthenon marbles is one of the most beautiful exhibition spaces in modern architecture.

Just as the Parthenon itself enjoys a 360-degree panorama of sparkling sea and green hills, the new ¤130 million gallery has a continuous view over the rooftops of Athens, interrupted only by the Acropolis itself. Sunlight fills the gallery through floor-to-ceiling glass, and the windows have such slender supports you might be standing in the open air enjoying blue skies and the crystal light which is the wonder of Attica.
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After utilising other ancient temples in Athens for their ceremonies, the members of Ellinais a revival of the religion of Ancient Greece worshiping the Olympian gods are to perform a ceremony on the Acropolis Itself.

From:
International Herald Tribune

After 1,500 years, pagans plan Acropolis prayer
The Associated Press
Published: August 28, 2008

ATHENS, Greece: A small group of pagans pledged Thursday to hold a protest prayer among the ruined Acropolis temples, more than 1,500 years after Christians stamped out worship of the ancient Greek gods.

Group spokeswoman Doretta Peppa said the worshippers would pray Sunday to Athena — goddess of wisdom and patron of ancient Athens — to protect the 2,500-year-old site. Peppa said followers of the old religion object to the removal last year of hundreds of sculptural masterpieces from a tiny museum on the Acropolis to a large new building under the citadel.
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The New Acropolis Museum as a building may now be almost complete – however, it will not be complete as a museum until it is able to display all the surviving Parthenon Sculptures under its roof.

From:
Spectator

Acropolis now
Wednesday, 27th August 2008
Henry Sands says Athens’s new museum is missing its Marbles

We have come to understand that missing sections from museum displays of ancient sculpture are the inevitable result of parts breaking off and becoming lost to the world. But at the New Acropolis Museum in Athens we know exactly where to find the stones that would fill those accusatory gaps.

The empty spaces act as a poignant reminder to the viewer that the collection is not complete — and that it will remain incomplete as long as the Elgin Marbles sit in the Duveen Room of the British Museum, their home since 1816. Now that there is a place to show them off, there is new sense of optimism among the Greeks that they may finally be reunited with the Marbles they believe to be rightfully theirs.
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In this interview, Bernard Tschumi makes it very clear that he believes that the Elgin Marbles will return to Athens, stating that the return will make sense to everyone once they see the facilities created within the New Acropolis Museum.

From:
Wallpaper

Bernard Tschumi Q&A exclusive
Architecture
8 August 2008

After nearly 30 years of planning, and eight years since the international competition was launched for the project, the New Acropolis Museum in Athens is ready: the collections are carefully being moved in as we speak, and the official opening is expected with much anticipation towards the end of the year.

Proudly headed by architect Bernard Tschumi, the new museum project team also comprises local architect Michael Photiadis and the museum’s director Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis, who showed us around the new bright and airy building, where we had the chance to meet Swiss-born Tschumi, and discuss his concept, the design, Athens and the Parthenon sculptures.
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An exhibition about the New Acropolis Museum has been running in Beijing since February.

During July though, in the run up to the Olympics, many more exhibits were added & a catalogue was produced to explain about both the museum & some of its contents that were on display.

This catalogue (in English, Greek & Mandarin) can be downloaded from the New Acropolis Museum’s website here.

When the New Acropolis Museum was being designed, the artefacts within it were considered as the factor that would define its eventual form. In this respect, the building is an anti-Bilbao – the form of the building is generated from the function, rater than a form being defined with the function them examined to see how it can fit within.

From:
Spero News

A vision for the new Acropolis Museum
The museum at the Acropolis is no mere shell. According to architect Michael Photiadis it was designed from “the inside out” to highlight the artifacts over architectural considerations.
Friday, August 01, 2008
By Danylo Hawaleshka
Article Tools

It somehow seems fitting that a museum built to showcase the architectural legacy of a temple honouring the warrior goddess Athena should itself be the outcome of numerous battles, some as yet unresolved.

For instance, Greek authorities required not one but four bare-knuckled design competitions – the first held more than 30 years ago – before deciding architects Bernard Tschumi of New York and Athens-based Michael Photiadis would bear the responsibility of creating the New Acropolis Museum.
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The British Museum is running out of time in which to return the Elgin Marbles before the New Acropolis Museum highlights the missing pieces for the whole world to see.

From:
Bloomberg News

Acropolis Museum Awaits Missing Body Parts, Held in London
By A. Craig Copetas
July 28 (Bloomberg)

At Athens’s New Acropolis Museum, the most popular exhibit is in London.

That absent art would be what the Greeks label the Parthenon Marbles, the British brand the Elgin Marbles and what the sculptor Greg Wyatt reckons are history’s most important and fought-over examples of priceless classical sculpture.
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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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Dimitrios Pantermalis is the president of the Organisation for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum. He talks here about various aspects of the New Acropolis Museum.

Make sure to also watch the videos of his interview available in two parts here & here.

From:
Global Atlanta

New Acropolis Museum to Open in Fall After Monumental Move
Phil Bolton – Publisher
Atlanta – 07.23.08

The new Acropolis museum in Athens, Greece, is scheduled to open in September, marking the end of the monumental tasks of building a 270,000-square-foot structure on an earthquake prone site and then transferring 2,500-year-old antiquities into their new home.

Dimitrios Pandermalis, president of the new museum and an archaeologist who has been overseeing the project for years, told GlobalAtlanta in a filmed interview that when the museum is finally opened its anticipated 3 million annual visitors will have “a realistic idea” of what classicism is all about.
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After much speculation & various conflicting reports, it now appears in the New Acropolis Museum, the copies of the British Museum’s Parthenon Sculptures will be displayed with a whiter colour than the authentic sculptures that they sit amongst. There is a certain irony in this of course, harking back to the cleaning controversy of the 1930s. Maybe once the actual sculptures are returned, they will still look much whiter.

This article is also notes that the museum is now scheduled to open in September of this year.

From:
The Art Newspaper

Parthenon frieze will be recreated in New Acropolis museum
Originals to be displayed next to plaster casts of British Museum’s marbles
Martin Bailey | 10.7.08 | Issue 193

LONDON. The long-awaited formal opening of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens has now been scheduled for September, after a series of delays. The gallery housing the Parthenon marbles, at the top of the museum, with a view towards the actual Parthenon 300m away, will be finally unveiled, although many of the other displays are not expected to be completed until next year.

After years of discussions, the museum has now decided how it will present the marbles. The originals are being displayed alongside plaster casts of the pieces removed from Greece, most of which are in the British Museum in London.
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Predictably (for any who follow Greek politics) the KKE (Greece’s Communist Party) has criticised plans that the New Acropolis Museum should be run any differently to every other museum in Greece – that is to say, they would prefer that there was never any progress, beyond the current self-serving culture of regular strike action that currently holds back development of the country’s museums.

For the New Acropolis Museum to be a truly world class museum though & achieve its goals, things have to change – conceptually is not the same as other Greek state run museums, so why should it have to operate in exactly the same way?

From:
Athens News Agency

07/12/2008
KKE rejects PM’s proposal

[...]

KKE leader meets archaeologists

In another development, KKE [The Communist Party of Greece] Secretary General Aleka Papariga met on Tuesday with the Greek Archaeologists Society saying afterwards that her party supported the archaeologists’ protest and stands by their side in light of the bill that will be tabled in Parliament and “which, in essence, passes a form of privatisation to the new museum which is being disengaged from the Acropolis.”

Papariga added that in general the sector of excavations and of archaeological monuments “is literally in danger from the most extreme privatisation because, unfortunately, archaeological treasure is also considered in Greece a means of obtaining wealth, a means of tourism and this is unacceptable.”