New Acropolis Museum opens with lavish party

Among the exhibits are small sculptures recently returned from Italy, The Vatican and Germany.

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 — when it served as a gunpowder store — it survived largely intact until a Venetian cannon shot caused a massive explosion in 1687. Elgin, a Scotsman, removed about half the surviving sculptures between 1801-04, when Greece was an unwilling part of the Ottoman Empire.

The British Museum has repeatedly rejected calls for their return. It says it legally owns the collection it bought from Elgin, who sold it to stave off bankruptcy, and that it is displayed free of charge in an international cultural context.

“I think they belong to all of us. We are all global citizens these days,” said British Museum spokeswoman Hannah Boulton.

But on the top floor of the new Acropolis Museum, Greece's counter-argument — that the sculptures were looted from a work of art so important that the surviving pieces should all be exhibited together — is eloquently laid out.

The glass hall with a panoramic view across Athens and the Parthenon itself displays the section of the frieze that Elgin's agents left behind, joined to plaster casts of the 90-odd works in London.

The soft brownish patina of the original marble contrasts starkly with the bright white of the copies: battle scenes are cut jaggedly in half, with the torso and heads of warriors and horses in London and the legs in Athens. The attempt to shock is deliberate.

“It is like looking at a family picture and seeing images of loved ones far away or lost to us,” Samaras said.

Greece has promised to compensate the British Museum with visiting exhibitions of major antiquities.

But the museum is much more than a political lever.

With about 150,000 square feet (14,000 square meters) of exhibition space, it 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.

Most left the citadel for the first time in late 2007, during a meticulously choreographed operation using a relay of cranes.

Now visitors can walk among freestanding statues and reliefs with surviving traces of paint; view fragments of sculptures and coins still bearing scorch marks from the Persians' sacking of the city in 480 B.C.; gaze through three stories of glass floors straight into the foundations, where construction revealed an entire neighborhood of ancient and early Christian Athens.

The museum opens to visitors Sunday. Entry is at a nominal charge of 1 euro (US$1.40) until the end of the year, when it will increase to 5 euro. The first four days are already completely sold out through Internet sales.

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