ATHENS, Greece — Gods, heroes and long-dead mortals stepped off their plinths into the evening sky of Athens on Saturday during the lavish opening of the Acropolis Museum, a decades-old dream that Greece hopes will also help reclaim a cherished part of its heritage from Britain.
The digitally animated display of artifacts on the museum walls ended years of delays and wrangling over the ultramodern building, set among apartment blocks and elegant neoclassical houses at the foot of the Acropolis hill.
The nearly $4.1 million-opening ceremony was attended by about 400 guests, including European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, UNESCO director-general Koichiro Matsuura and foreign heads of state and government.
Conspicuously, there were no government officials from Britain, which has repeatedly refused to repatriate dozens of 2,500-year-old sculptures from the Parthenon temple that are held in the British Museum.
President Karolos Papoulias said Greeks think of the Acropolis monuments as their “identity and pride,” and renewed the demand for the missing marble works, displayed in London for the past 200 years.
“The whole world can now see the most important sculptures from the Parthenon together,” Papoulias said. “Some are missing. It is time to heal the wounds on the monument by returning the marbles that belong to it.”
Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said the sculptures “will inevitably return,” but ruled out Greece acknowledging the British Museum’s legal title to the works — as requested by officials in London as a precondition for any loan.
With about 150,000 square feet of exhibition space, the museum holds more than 4,000 ancient works, many of them never displayed before due to lack of space in the cramped old museum that sat atop the Acropolis hill.
The museum opens to visitors today.
Entry is at a nominal charge of 1 euro, or $1.40, until the end of the year, when it will increase to 5 euros.
Parthenon history
The Parthenon was built at the height of Athens’ glory, between 447-432 B.C., in honor of the city’s patron goddess, Athena, and is still considered one of the most impressive buildings in the world.
Despite its burning by invading Goths in 267 A.D., conversion into a Christian church in the early 6th century and Ottoman occupation from the 15th century, it survived largely intact until a Venetian cannon shot caused a massive explosion in 1687.
British diplomat Lord Elgin removed about half the surviving sculptures between 1801-04, when Greece was an unwilling part of the Ottoman Empire. To stave off bankruptcy, Elgin sold them to the British Museum, which has repeatedly rejected Greece’s calls for their return.
