perspective
Posted on 06/19/2009 11:14:41 AM PDT by eleni121
ATHENS, Greece – Greece opens its long-anticipated new Acropolis Museum Saturday, boosting its decades-old campaign for the return of 2,500-year-old sculptures removed from the ancient citadel by a 19th century British diplomat.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Lost my marbles PING
Anyone going this year?
Has 0bama apologized yet?
I’m going to Athens in September.
I’ll be in Santorini for my honeymoon in September. We have a one day stop off in Athens.
Abused?
What condition do you think they’d be in today if they had been left in place?
Then you should visit—From 21 June 2009 to 31 December 2009, the cost of entry for all visitors is 1 euro.
Not a bad price for what you get!
The marbles should be returned now that Greece is prepared to care for them. If they hadn’t been taken by the British; most of them would have been either reduced to rubble, or sold off to private collectors by now.
Well for one they were torn apart from their place on the temple in order to ship them to England. Illegally.
They were acid washed a few years ago removing their patina, about 1000 years worth of damage.
Anything else?
Yes they should be returned as they are stolen and vandalized property.
As for the rest of your post-—just a theory. They were vandalized between 1801 to 1812 and in 1828 the Greeks became independent after a brutal war of independence wiht the Muslim Turk.
The Marbles would have been safe after that.
Cool. We just booked the dates and are researching what to do while we are there. The info on the museum is great. We are also going to Mykonos for a few days. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Thanks
In another 2000 years, do you think people will dig and find a marble statue of Obama holding my wallet?
The Greeks did not become that interested in their sculptural history until within the last century. The pictured image "Athena of Piraeus" was discovered when digging a sewer line. It had been buried as junk. It's been over thirty years since I took the class, but IIRC, a museum director was walking by and saw part of the arm as a backhoe operator opened the hole. When the director tried to stop the project to recover the sculpture, the workmen became very upset and threatened him. They feared the job would be shut down for an archeological dig.
True. As we don't have a counter-factual; we can only speculate about the fate of the marbles, had they been left in place. We do know that the British took very good care of them — so, at least they continue to exist. Now, the only issue is where they should be.
“The marbles should be returned now that Greece is prepared to care for them. If they hadn’t been taken by the British; most of them would have been either reduced to rubble, or sold off to private collectors by now.”
Who knows what Hitler would have done with them when he occupied Greece. We saw what the National Socialists did with so much of Europe’s other artistic treasures.
I really enjoyed Crete and was deeply inspired by Ephesos and Patmos.
Rhodes, not so much, though perhaps now I’d appreciate it more.
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