May 30, 2008

The New Acropolis Museum at Athens Airport

Posted at 10:33 pm in New Acropolis Museum

A new free exhibition has opened at Athen’s Eleftherios Venizelos Airport, to publicise the New Acropolis Museum. I actually stumbled on the exhibition by chance whilst passing through the airport before it officially opened. It tells enough to get visitors interested & to make them want to find out more, but unfortunately it is located in the area on an area where few people are likely to accidentally pass it. This is already the problem with the permanent exhibition about the archaeological finds made during the construction of the airport.

From:
Athens News Agency

05/29/2008
Exhibition on new Acropolis Museum

An exhibition on the construction and exhibits of the new Acropolis Museum was inaugurated at Athens international airport on Tuesday by Culture Minister Mihalis Liapis and Transport Minister Kostis Hatzidakis.

Entitled “The New Museum of the Acropolis – Soon a new destination” the exhibition gives visitors from every country a foretaste of the new museum that is expected to open its doors to the public in the autumn.

It is housed within the airport departures area and will run until February 2009, providing information on the work underway for preparing the museum, as well as on the museum exhibits and services. This will be updated on a regular basis as the opening date for the new Acropolis Museum approaches.

In his address during the inauguration ceremony for the exhibition on Tuesday, Liapis stressed that the new Acropolis Museum will be a rare landmark in the map of world museums, being a thematic museum built within the Acropolis archaeological area and on the remains of ancient Athens itself, which will be visible and accessible to visitors.

The minister said the museum would provide an additional point of attraction for visitors in Athens itself, which the government wanted to be more than a transit destination for tourists heading for the islands but a city offering culture in its broader sense, that included both its cultural heritage and modern artistic endeavour.

Through photographs and a four-minute audiovisual display, the exhibition presents the history of the museum’s construction from the start until the present day, some of the exhibits that will be on display, the transfer of antiquities from the old museum to the new museum. It will also feature a life-size copy of part of the western frieze of the Parthenon and a copy of a marble statue of a girl, both of which are among the new museum’s exhibits.

It is open on a 24-hour basis, next to the permanent exhibition of archaeological finds unearthed during the construction of the airport itself, and accessible to everyone in the airport.

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