Last week we visited the Acropolis; yesterday we visited the Acropolis Museum. Both sites are "good to think with" if you are trying to understand Greek attitudes towards the past and towards modernity. On the visit to the Acropolis, what I noticed this time around was not so much what was there as what wasn't. I was struck by how successive generations of archaeologists (mainly the first ones, the Greeks of the early to middle nineteenth century) have stripped away all traces of the later use of the site: not just the Ottoman-era mosque that sat within the ruins of the Parthenon, but the Frankish tower--imagine the outrage anywhere in Europe if the local authorities proposed tearing down a 13th-century fortification because it wasn't "original"--and any traces of the long use of the site as a Christian sanctuary. The only hint of a later use can be found in the late Roman "Beulé gate," which one sees only as one is leaving. Otherwise, the site is an expanse of Classical marble, glorifying a four decade period in Athens' history when the surviving monuments were built. These monuments, in particular the Parthenon, are wreathed in scaffolding, signalling the Greeks' determination to make that legacy whole again and return the monuments to their pristine state, captured as in amber, or in the little plaster vignettes for sale everywhere in the Plaka.
The only other signs that a modern world has intervened up on the hill are the round viewing platform with its prominent Greek flag--no subtlety in the message here, a significance every schoolchild understands from the story of the brave Greeks who pulled down the Nazi flag and replaced it with the Greek one at the beginning of the German occupation--and the old Museum. This structure, first built in 1865 and remodeled several times, is low-slung and unobtrusive, but it presented a problem and an opportunity to the Greeks. It was a problem in that it breaks the spell of an unsullied classical Acropolis; and it was an opportunity to create a new museum offsite, which would showcase not just the Acropolis' treasures, but Greece's entry into the first ranks of technologically and culturally sophisticated countries. The website for the museum claims that the new museum was necessary because the old one was too small to hold the finds and accommodate the visitors. This claim is doubtful: the collection of material has hardly grown since the nineteenth century, when the bulk of the Acropolis was excavated; and my memory of visiting the museum in the mid-ninetees is that, while it sustained a steady flow of tourists looking to beat the heat, one could easily find space to stand and contemplate favorite pieces at length. But anyway.
So the new museum was built, and has become the showpiece of Greece's cultural archipelago of sites and museums. The structure has several functions. The first is to reinforce the message that the Acropolis is primarily about a brief but glorious period in ancient Greek history, which has been preserved and lovingly restored by the modern Greeks (although enough is said about the various desecrations by Persians, Romans, Venetians and Turks to reinforce Greece's sense of tragic victimhood). The museum expands on the site's theme: it has more to show us about the Archaic acropolis, preserved in fragmentary statues and bronze dedications if not in buildings. In fact, the museum is designed like a symphony: you begin with the themes being introduced, with maquettes of the site in its various phases. There is even, at the end, one showing the hill encircled by Frankish fortifications, although no hint is given about how those later encrustations were stripped away. Then you pass through displays of pottery and small finds, which transmit the theme of the site as a sacred space, a locus of worship and visits by pilgrims and devotees. You move upstairs to the Archaic material, seeing the site in its robust youth, full of strange and beautiful sculptures and ornately decorated temples. The Persian sack is hinted at but not highlighted; instead you pass seamlessly into the glory days of the Acropolis. Doing this properly, you should head upstairs to take in the Parthenon in all of its glory; first a video, then a promenade around the Panathenaic frieze, metopes and pedimental statues, casts interspersed with the occasional real fragment. Coming back down, you can examine the sculptures and finds of the Erechtheion (including the Maidens, still undergoing their painstaking restoration), the Temple of Athena Nike, the Sanctuary of Artemis Brauroneia. Then the bust of Alexander greets you as you pass through a small section on the afterlife of the sanctuary, encompassing only the Hellenistic and Roman periods; the history of the site ends before Christianity arrives.
Aside from celebrating the glory that was fifth-century Athens, the museum also highlights the wonders of modern Greece, in its advanced museology. The effect begins with the building itself, not just an advanced design, but reworked to accommodate the excavation and preservation of the ancient remains found below. Entering the building, you have to pass through a metal detector and have your bags screened. Why the authorities think they are more likely to encounter vandalism or terrorism at this museum than at any of the other museums or sites in Greece is a bit of a mystery. Other tokens of the sophistication of the modern Greek museum abound; not just in multi-media displays (that's old hat now), but in the sophisticated on-site cleaning process applied to the Caryatids, involving patient application of a laser to a nickel-sized section of the statues at a time. One of my students speculated that they had actually finished cleaning the maidens a while ago, but left the equipment in place to let us know that they had it.
The third purpose of the museum, intimately connected with the first two, is to project the screaming argument: give us back the Parthenon sculptures. I have to say that this message seems to have been toned down somewhat from the first year or so of the museum's existence, although one can still feel the ghost of Melina Mercouri, tears streaming down her face, floating around the upper gallery, gazing sadly at the plaster casts of the pieces which had been "violently removed" (to quote the video display) by Lord Elgin. On the other hand, we saw that the video did not completely ignore the role that early Christians played in removing and destroying sculptures. But not one word appears of the systematic removal of any trace of Christian, Frankish and Ottoman structures by Greek archaeologists in the nineteenth century.
The museum makes the case for the return of the sculptures, but does not end the argument. I will leave aside the complicated arguments about cultural patrimony, and the pointless debate about the relative merits of the British Museum (and, let's be fair, the Louvre) versus the Acropolis museum as homes for these pieces. I will make one unwelcome observation, that the museum's display does undercut its own argument somewhat. Comparing the casts of the missing pieces to the originals side by side, it is clear that the sculptures that spent the last two centuries in museums in London and Paris have fared much better than the ones exposed to the Athenian nephos (smog) through a good part of the twentieth century. One has only to compare the face of the Maiden carried off by Lord Elgin to her sisters standing in the museum: no amount of laser-guided botox can restore their delicate features. This, I know, is not in itself a valid reason for leaving the sculptures where they are. But the resources lavished on the Acropolis Museum stands in sharp contrast to the shabby state of many of Greece's other museums. The Crisis has already caused cutbacks not just in preservation and restoration, but in staffing, including security (as anyone who has tried to visit the vase collection at the National Archaeological Museum on the wrong day can attest). Is the Acropolis Museum, that fantasia of twenty-first century museum design, really sustainable as an institution for the preservation of the Hellenic patrimony?
The only other signs that a modern world has intervened up on the hill are the round viewing platform with its prominent Greek flag--no subtlety in the message here, a significance every schoolchild understands from the story of the brave Greeks who pulled down the Nazi flag and replaced it with the Greek one at the beginning of the German occupation--and the old Museum. This structure, first built in 1865 and remodeled several times, is low-slung and unobtrusive, but it presented a problem and an opportunity to the Greeks. It was a problem in that it breaks the spell of an unsullied classical Acropolis; and it was an opportunity to create a new museum offsite, which would showcase not just the Acropolis' treasures, but Greece's entry into the first ranks of technologically and culturally sophisticated countries. The website for the museum claims that the new museum was necessary because the old one was too small to hold the finds and accommodate the visitors. This claim is doubtful: the collection of material has hardly grown since the nineteenth century, when the bulk of the Acropolis was excavated; and my memory of visiting the museum in the mid-ninetees is that, while it sustained a steady flow of tourists looking to beat the heat, one could easily find space to stand and contemplate favorite pieces at length. But anyway.
So the new museum was built, and has become the showpiece of Greece's cultural archipelago of sites and museums. The structure has several functions. The first is to reinforce the message that the Acropolis is primarily about a brief but glorious period in ancient Greek history, which has been preserved and lovingly restored by the modern Greeks (although enough is said about the various desecrations by Persians, Romans, Venetians and Turks to reinforce Greece's sense of tragic victimhood). The museum expands on the site's theme: it has more to show us about the Archaic acropolis, preserved in fragmentary statues and bronze dedications if not in buildings. In fact, the museum is designed like a symphony: you begin with the themes being introduced, with maquettes of the site in its various phases. There is even, at the end, one showing the hill encircled by Frankish fortifications, although no hint is given about how those later encrustations were stripped away. Then you pass through displays of pottery and small finds, which transmit the theme of the site as a sacred space, a locus of worship and visits by pilgrims and devotees. You move upstairs to the Archaic material, seeing the site in its robust youth, full of strange and beautiful sculptures and ornately decorated temples. The Persian sack is hinted at but not highlighted; instead you pass seamlessly into the glory days of the Acropolis. Doing this properly, you should head upstairs to take in the Parthenon in all of its glory; first a video, then a promenade around the Panathenaic frieze, metopes and pedimental statues, casts interspersed with the occasional real fragment. Coming back down, you can examine the sculptures and finds of the Erechtheion (including the Maidens, still undergoing their painstaking restoration), the Temple of Athena Nike, the Sanctuary of Artemis Brauroneia. Then the bust of Alexander greets you as you pass through a small section on the afterlife of the sanctuary, encompassing only the Hellenistic and Roman periods; the history of the site ends before Christianity arrives.
Aside from celebrating the glory that was fifth-century Athens, the museum also highlights the wonders of modern Greece, in its advanced museology. The effect begins with the building itself, not just an advanced design, but reworked to accommodate the excavation and preservation of the ancient remains found below. Entering the building, you have to pass through a metal detector and have your bags screened. Why the authorities think they are more likely to encounter vandalism or terrorism at this museum than at any of the other museums or sites in Greece is a bit of a mystery. Other tokens of the sophistication of the modern Greek museum abound; not just in multi-media displays (that's old hat now), but in the sophisticated on-site cleaning process applied to the Caryatids, involving patient application of a laser to a nickel-sized section of the statues at a time. One of my students speculated that they had actually finished cleaning the maidens a while ago, but left the equipment in place to let us know that they had it.
The third purpose of the museum, intimately connected with the first two, is to project the screaming argument: give us back the Parthenon sculptures. I have to say that this message seems to have been toned down somewhat from the first year or so of the museum's existence, although one can still feel the ghost of Melina Mercouri, tears streaming down her face, floating around the upper gallery, gazing sadly at the plaster casts of the pieces which had been "violently removed" (to quote the video display) by Lord Elgin. On the other hand, we saw that the video did not completely ignore the role that early Christians played in removing and destroying sculptures. But not one word appears of the systematic removal of any trace of Christian, Frankish and Ottoman structures by Greek archaeologists in the nineteenth century.
The museum makes the case for the return of the sculptures, but does not end the argument. I will leave aside the complicated arguments about cultural patrimony, and the pointless debate about the relative merits of the British Museum (and, let's be fair, the Louvre) versus the Acropolis museum as homes for these pieces. I will make one unwelcome observation, that the museum's display does undercut its own argument somewhat. Comparing the casts of the missing pieces to the originals side by side, it is clear that the sculptures that spent the last two centuries in museums in London and Paris have fared much better than the ones exposed to the Athenian nephos (smog) through a good part of the twentieth century. One has only to compare the face of the Maiden carried off by Lord Elgin to her sisters standing in the museum: no amount of laser-guided botox can restore their delicate features. This, I know, is not in itself a valid reason for leaving the sculptures where they are. But the resources lavished on the Acropolis Museum stands in sharp contrast to the shabby state of many of Greece's other museums. The Crisis has already caused cutbacks not just in preservation and restoration, but in staffing, including security (as anyone who has tried to visit the vase collection at the National Archaeological Museum on the wrong day can attest). Is the Acropolis Museum, that fantasia of twenty-first century museum design, really sustainable as an institution for the preservation of the Hellenic patrimony?
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