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After 33 years the Acropolis Museum in Athens is finally open — and it's enough to make a London patriot reconsider the case for giving the Greeks back their history...
Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin and 11th Earl of Kincardine, may have been a chancer and cheat but by ripping sculptures from the Parthenon he helped save one of the world's great art treasures for posterity. By bringing them to Britain he also helped put Greek art at the centre of world attention, at a time when Athens was a little-visited backwater.
In the British Museum, the Elgin Marbles stand in pride of place among the artefacts of the greatest ancient civilisations and beat them hands down for grace and brilliance. If the great museums of former robber Empires were to return all their dubiously acquired loot to their places of origin, where would we be?
The Louvre, the great museums of Berlin, the Pushkin in Moscow, as well as the British Museum, would all be stripped half bare. We would lose the chance to see the works of different cultures side by side, and the many millions who find it easier to travel to New York or London than Nineveh would no longer see them. Would it, for example, have been clever to return the British Museum's Mesopotamian treasures to Iraq, given the recent damage to antiquities there?
Such are the well-known arguments for resisting Greek demands for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens.
I have them used myself, with conviction, when others have taken the Greek side. Oh, really? I say, if these others happen to be North or South American. And have you considered giving Manhattan, or the Pampas, back to the Indians?
These arguments came in my luggage last weekend, when I went to see the new Acropolis Museum, the 130 million project, 33 years in the making, whose main purpose is to refute at least one of the British Museum's points. Athens has nowhere worthy of the marbles, the BM used to say, and as the old Acropolis Museum was a squat drab bunker, they were right.
The new Acropolis Museum, built to house both sculptures from the Parthenon and other treasures from the Acropolis, sets out to show that Athens can make a place more fitting than is possible in the grey light of Bloomsbury. Rarely has so much architectural effort gone into proving a point — but the project almost proved the opposite. It nearly showed that Athens couldn't actually make such a place. The new building has only arrived after decades of abortive effort, four different architectural competitions, protracted wrangling about its location and, according to the museum's architect, “about 100 lawsuits”.
The site is at the foot of the Acropolis, close to the Theatre of Dionysos where the great tragedies were first performed, and in view of the Parthenon. It is archaeologically rich, with the intricate remnants of houses and streets from early Christian times. This is why some argued, vehemently, that the museum should be in a less sensitive location. Others argued with equal force that such a charged place is exactly where it should be.
The architect is Bernard Tschumi, Swiss-born, and now based in New York and Paris. He was a surprising choice. Tschumi is best known as a star of deconstructivism, the once avant-garde architectural movement that made a virtue out of clashing shapes, disorientation and flying shards of metal. There was little in his CV to suggest he could make the delicate judgments needed to create settings for precious antiquities.
Yet the finished building is surprisingly normal. It is sober and rectangular, in grey concrete, something like the 1950s civic museums you find in Mediterranean countries. Some Greek critics have called it too big for its site, but it is not overbearing and seems reasonably scaled, given its significance.
You ascend the museum in a slow spiral, first up a shallow glass ramp and then via escalators to the top-floor gallery, which contains those sculptures from the Parthenon that Elgin did not remove, and plaster casts of those he did. The gallery is Parthenon-sized, with a glass-walled passage running around it, allowing the long friezes that once ringed the temple with vivid scenes of battles and processions to be seen in their entirety. This oblong box is at an angle skewed from the rest of the building, so as to align exactly with the Parthenon itself, visible high on its hill.
There are good moments on the journey from ground to sky. Those early Christian houses that excited the archaeologists are revealed through holes cut in the floor, and there is a high-ceilinged first-floor gallery, beautifully lit with natural light, in which a grove of standing figures stand on chaste marble plinths. Tschumi doesn't like the usual clutter of museums, such as intrusive display panels and seating, and has kept it to a minimum, which creates an impressively calm atmosphere.
There are also some clunkingly awful moments. You enter, under a vast, clumsy portico, an elephantine proboscis propped on three thumping columns. Throughout the building, architecture gets in the way of the exhibits. There are too many fat columns, and thick joints between panels, and holes cut in walls and ceiling for purposes of acoustics or lighting. The serene sculptures are interrupted with too much visual noise.
Among the prime exhibits are the caryatids, the female statues which propped part of the Erectheum until replaced by replicas. They stand in an ugly pool of yellowish artificial light, in an airport-like zone, as if waiting their turn to be called for boarding by easyJet. Many of the details — botched-up joins between wall and floor, or lines of metal that are supposed to be straight but actually wobble — show that craftsmanship has declined since the age of Pericles.
BUT the greatest crime has yet to happen. Two apartment blocks, from the first half of the 20th century, stand in front of the museum, rich in fine art deco and neo-classical decoration, and with riotous greenery on their roofs. The plan is to demolish them, to create a pompous void between the museum and the Acropolis. Yet the beauty of the site is in its multiple levels of history and human life, from the ancient Greeks to the early Christians, to the new building. To cut out these blocks, which are evidence that Athenians could create beauty in modern as well as ancient times, would be pointless vandalism.
So the museum, opened last Saturday with pomp and ministers, and motorcades and circling helicopters, is flawed. However, it does its job of storing and displaying the treasures of the Parthenon. One of the British Museum's objections to transferring the marbles has been crossed off the list. But does this mean they should, finally, go?
Standing there on Sunday, as the first members of the public flooded in, and armed with all the arguments of a London patriot, I felt my objections melting away. It is partly that the Parthenon sculptures form a single work of art, which has been arbitrarily dismembered. This work can never be completely restored but there is still much to be gained from having as much as possible in one place. Like a shattered figure, it is good to reconnect the head to the neck to the torso, even if the feet and hands are permanently lost.
To be more mundane, keeping the marbles will now be terrible PR for Britain. Each person who visits the new museum will see the same story: here is a great family of sculptures kept apart by the grouchy Brits, still exercising their imperial rights of loot and pillage. Most of all, the Greeks have shown, by building the museum, how much the marbles mean to them.
There is nothing, in short, quite like the Parthenon's sculptures, and returning them would not mean that the Louvre must return the paintings that Napoleon tore from the walls of Italian monasteries, or that Venice should hand back the art that the Crusaders stole from 13th-century Constantinople.
The British Museum should, with generosity and grace, hand back the marbles. They should do so without conditions, except one. They should demand that the Greeks show that they care for their own heritage, by saving those 20th-century apartment blocks.
Reader views (29)
It seems to me that the one thing consistently overlooked in this debate is the wanton destruction of archaeology to make way for this architectural monster of a museum. Greece has a consistent history of disregard for its cultural heritage, and have made the marbles a flag waving centre piece. The fact that archaeology has suffered to accomodate a building to acommodate more archaeology should act as an ominous beacon. Greek archaeologists were the first to highlight the threat posed by the museum to Greek heritage, but this was largely ignored in the face of 'progress'.
Greece has yet to learn how to protect and care for its heritage. Returning the Marbles may ease some peoples guilt in the UK and allow Greek politicians to parade their triumph, but it will do nothing for the protection of the heritage that survives and rots on Greek hilltops through out the nation.
- Jerry, Cardff
So, if we build an empty gallery, can we expect a return of all the paintings sold by Cromwell?
Should any set of paintings creating an altar piece be reunited because one owner builds an empty frame?
Keeping the marbles will now be terrible PR for Britain? What rubbish, nobody should give in to such attempts at blackmail. Good grief.
And anyway the marbles were legally bought at a time when the Greeks didn't really care.
- Stephen, London
THE WHOLE THING DOES NOT HAVE TO DO WITH POLICY,POLITICIANS,PR OR EVEN ART AND HERITAGE!IT HAS ONLY TO DO WITH A NUMBER OF EXTREMELY SHORT-MINDED PEOPLE WHO STILL LIVE IN ELGIN`S TIME AND HAVE THE POWER TO DECIDE OVER CONTEMPORARY MATTERS! DEAR MUSEUM CURATORS OF THE BM, WHEN IS THE NEXT PARTY GIVEN IN THE HALL OF THE MARBLES!? WAKE UP! THERE ARE NO ARGUMENTS LEFT TO KEEP THEM THERE!SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO LEARN WHEN IT IS THE RIGHT TIME TO LET IT GO!MAYBE A THERAPIST WOULD HELP YOU!AND YET GREEKS WOULD BE GRATEFUL!ISN`T THAT A GREAT IRONY!AND MR MOORE,DO YOU BELIEVE THAT THE HALLS HOSTING OUR MARBLES IN THE BM ARE BETTER THAN THE ACROPOLIS MUSEUM?AND PLEASE SHOW US YOUR ARCHITECTURE CERTIFICATE THAT ENABLES YOU TO JUDGE NEGATIVELY THIS MAGNIFICENT BUILDING! GREEKS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN PRIDE BUT NOT SNOBISH!
YOU COULD ONLY READ SOME HISTORY IN YOUR FREE TIME!THIS WOULD PROVE HELPFUL NOT ONLY TO YOU BUT TO YOUR READERS TOO!
- Maria, ATHENS-GREECE
As British refuse to give the marbles back, Greeks should refuse to give the Olympic flame to London for the Olympic Games. How about that?
- Andreas, Cyprus
Return the marbles to their rightful owners..
I wonder what the British people would think and feel should Greece or any other country for that matter have a piece of their history..
And what exactly is so 'British' about the British Museum? there's nothing British in it!!!!!
- Nicky Xenofontos Fournia, Nicosia, Cyprus
This magnificent Hellenistic collection of sculptures was removed from Western Torkey in the late C19 by German archaeologists. It is now in Berlin.
- Dectora, London UK
I was impressed from your clear thoughts and the straight way you expressed your ideas particularly when writing..."still exercising their imperial rights of loot and pillage". I congratulate you because I think this is the focal point of the controversy .....
- Kostas Fokas, ATHENS, GREECE
To: Paul, London
Not if they are returned as a gift! 
- Katerina, Athens, Greece
I think that the curators of the two museums should play a game of marbles to decide who gets them
The big problem is that this has all got too jingoistic. If the UK give tham back it will be trumpeted in Greece as a great victory and a massive defeat for British pride. That's why they won't get given back.
- Paul, London
For a long period of time the excuse for keeping the marbles in England was that Greece could not provide a proper place to store and maintain them.
Now that the Acropolis Museum is there this excuse has to withdraw and the marbles to be returned where they belong.
- Iosif Charitonidis, MYTILINI,HELLAS
Capturing historical symbols is an old fashioned way of showing brutality, power and conquer.
I believe it is a common sense that BM is not aligned with such principles.
The future will reveal the true of the above statement.
- Nikos S, Athens - Greece
When the Greeks managed to fight back Othoman rulling they surrounded the Turks on the Acropolis hill. Because Greeks were afraid the Turks would take down the giant columes of the temple in order to remove the metal holding the marbles together and make bullets, the Greeks gave ammunitions (bullets!) to the Turks!!!
They gave them bullets because the momument was of such importance to the Greeks, bullets they threatened their lives. This is a fact!
It is a shame to say that the greeks did not care of the marbles or protected them. Lord Elgin choose to steal the best preserved metopes and sculptures.
And I do not believe pollution in London is any better than Athens. Comparing the size of the city it must be a bit worst.
- Ioanna, Nicosia, Cyprus
Stelios
Now let me see. Did Greece not have an "unfortunate" period of ruling over other peoples or was that their heroic period.
Where in my comments did I say it was part of our history.
The perception I received was that most of the artifacts were appreciated as building materials for new construction.
I think you should be more acccurate in your argument if you want to convince people that The Marbles should return to Greece.
- Jt, London
Keep them in the UK?? Hmmm that is not right Jt.
They were always there because... you got them from Athens a long time ago. And also they are destroyed because they were cut brutally from the temple stones.
Greece has kept the rest you left behind in excellent condition!! All of them.
So bring back something that you got, without asking the right owners... and that is the Greeks, not the Turks.
- John Rigas, Athens, Greece
Thank goodness Mr Moore that you went, you saw and you have the vision that suits the twenty first century! Returning the Parthenon Marbles to Athens will be the best PR for the British Museum. At last a modern universal museum, with the ability to promote cultural co-operation, keen to make good what has been unfairly fragmented for far too long.
- Marlen Godwin, London
JT, it is understandable that you have that perspective on the legality of their acquisition from the ruling authority of the time. You do fail to mention though the fact that that authority was not Greek. Britain unfortunately has a long history of being a foreign ruling authority in various countries, hence it is probably very difficult for you to adopt the other end's point of view.
Claiming that the Parthenon marbles from Athens are part of the British history, is probably going to come up in Jack Dee's future stand up routines.
If anyone is making this a political issue, that is the British Museum and the British government. This is an issue about art and that is how it should be treated. I understand their reluctance to hand them back as they are by far the best showcase of the museum.
Exactly what are you implying when saying "Keep them in UK where they have always been appreciated"?
Greeks have always been appreciative of them and that is proven by the care shown to the artifacts that have remained in Greece despite the extremely difficult circumstances (Ottoman ruling - Nazi occupation in WW2).
This is the beginning of the story my friend. A story that ends with the marbles being reunited at their home. The choice is as simple as Chris wrote earlier and the majority of the people choose the former rather than the latter of the two options.
- Stelios Asikopoulos, London, UK
The Marbles were legally acquired from the ruling authority at the time and have been better looked after than most of those articles that remained. End of story. Get over it.Keep them in UK where they have always been appreciated as opposed to being used for cynical political purposes.
- Jt, London
Jon you seem to be very upset.. what happened? You see that the rest of the world is claiming back what you have stolen and you afraid that there will be nothing left?
Protests outside the BM have happened recently and wil happen again very soon... YOU WILL HAND THEM BACK like the civilised nations of Italy and Germany did ....
- Andreas Sideris, london, UK
Aristeidis, do you have any arguments to back up your hopes for the prevalence of the "British endemic characteristics"?
How exactly is the British Museum's image helped by continuing a debate about ownership of artifacts that it purchased from a looter?
If you had any idea about British characteristics, you would have been aware of those that are a lot more endemic in this country at the moment. Multiculturalism, tolerance, integration and respect for the heritage of other nations.
The marbles should go back where they belong; that is as close to the Parthenon as possible. It has nothing to do with politics, nationalities or even Greece for that matter. It is an issue of doing justice to some of the most spectacular art creations in the history of humanity.
- Stelios Asikopoulos, London, UK
The interesting question is: Who do you want to win?...
The new-English intellectual arguments of moderation, realism and co-operation with others... Or the old-English mentality of colonialism and exploitation, which is desperate for justification, reinventing itself now as 'ambassadors of human culture', and even reiterating self-constructed ideologies and myths of some kind of 'English superiority'?
the choice is yours.
we need courage to see the truth, our history, and then change our future.
- Chris, Leeds
It's not a PR battle mr aristides.Greeks don't do fake battles unless they believe in them.(Obviously you are not a hellene)
- Elli, piraeus,greece
Oh Jon from London, you are so funny! What exactly is part of your history.?? Please do tell! If your history is loot and pilferage as the great empire, well then yes you are correct. I on the other hand would not be proud. You have the nerve to talk about badly eroded marbles. There is a whole list of wire brushes and toxic chemicals used so "lovingly" by the BM to successfully destroy the outer layer of the marbles forever. For once, rise above the empire and do the right thing.
- Suzanna, athens, greece
The Greeks will at the end of the day lose this PR battle as they have in many a case (e.g. Macedonia). Patience and prudence, endemic to the British character, may well prevail upon short-term enthusiasm and naivety.
The British Museum, much older than the Greek State or the reinvention of the inhabitants of southern Balkans as Hellenes, shall hopefully hold it's ground.
- Aristeidis Paraskakis, Thessaloniki, Hellas
Thank you Mr Moore for supporting the return of the marbles.Also,thank you to every non-Greek who has done the same.Yes,it means a lot for us.It may sound emotional to you but while watching the opening of the museum on TV for a moment my eyes filled up with tears.It was a mixture of pride,nostalgia and sense of duty to your country and heritage.In a way ,there were similar feelings to when the Olympic games for 2004 were allocated to greece.
- Elli, piraeus,greece
Absolutely "NO!" They are part pof our history now, and sending them back to where they were will do nothing for their history, just Greek Nationalism. They don't match the badly eroded Greek marbles, they certainly won't 'complete' them as only 40% survive today. Do your homework, and stop patronising the rest of the world to make yourself feel better.
- Jon, London, UK.
Three excellent points by Rowan Moore:
1. "Keeping the marbles will now be terrible PR for Britain."
2. Returning the marbles need not create a legal precedent.
3. Save "those 20th-century apartment blocks".
- Vassilis, Athens, Greece
'' I have, My Lord, the pleasure of announcing to you the possession of the 8th metope, that one where there is the Centaur carrying off the Woman. This piece has caused much trouble in all respects, and I have even been obliged to be a little barbarous''.
G.B. Lusieri, Lord Elgin's artist
- Jmwarwick, Warwick, UK
Comments on the interior achitecural design are a bit harsh imo. Mostly the "visual noise" comment, since the ceiling is so high that in my point of view compensates for the columns size and add to the drama. Caryatids are placed beautifully like if they are welcoming visitors from afar. I do agree though on the "save the 20th-century apartment blocks" and of course I do agree on the Return of the Parthenon Marbles. All in all, thank you for raising the issue.
- Katerina, Athens, Greece
I am a Greek living in London and I always feel great sympathy for people who see beyond nationalistic arguments. The parthenon marbles do not belong to Greece, they do not belong to the Greek people and they definitely not belong to the British Museum. They marbles belong to the other marbles and the to the monument itself and the best place to display that is at the new acropolis museum. Greece would be eternally grateful to Britain if they do return.
- Thanos, London
