Reconstruction of the east pediment of the Parthenon according to drawing by Karl Schwerzek (1896).
Athena has just emerged from Zeus’s skull fully armed and equipped. She is looking at him. The King of the Gods is looking back at her amazed and surprised. Nike is intending to put a wreath on the head of a newborn goddess. On the right, Hephaestus can be seen holding an axe with which he split Zeus’s skull.
Did you know the Stoa of Attalos was built between 159 BC - 138 BC. The impressive columns measured over 116 m long and 20 m deep, with two rows of 45 columns. It was used to house shops and businesses for the Athenians. Some say it was the first ancient shopping centre! - SeenByNina
The amazing thing about Athens is that you can experience ancient ruins alongside modern buildings. The Acropolis offers an amazing panorama of the Greek capital and so special at sunset! At Monastiraki Square, it’s awesome to enjoy the bars and restaurants looking out at the Acropolis! @mariandthecity
Escape from the crowds for an (almost) private view!
“If you go to Philopappos Hill early in the day you’ll see a 360 degree view of Athens without having to share it. You will see the Acropolis ahead, and to the south sweeping views till the Aegean sea!” - Myfoodmyhappiness
“Hanging out in Athens at the site of the first ever Olympics, then dipping back into modernity for a air-conditioned café and frappé. Just one of the many reasons Athens in such an incredible city!” - charliepr1ce
“The entire British museum is an active crime scene” - John Oliver
[image description: two pictures, one above the other. The first image shows a statue originally from the Acropolis in Athens, now in the British Museum. The statue is a column shaped like a woman. It is labelled London. The bottom image is from the Acropolis Museum in Athens, showing the other five matching column/statues, with a space for the missing statue pointedly left open. This picture is shot from above and is labelled Athens.
image in savvysergeant’s reblog: screencap of tags from two people. Feeblekazoo’s tags read: the degree to which the Acropolis museum is designed to shame the British Museum is spectactular. butherlipsarenotmoving’s tags read: the acropolis museum is the most passive aggressive museum i’ve ever been to and i love it
/end id]
For those of you who don’t know museum drama, one of the largest and most famous parts of the British Museum’s collection is the so-called Elgin Marbles, which were looted from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin in the 18th Century. (The Acropolis is the hill in Athens, Greece which has some of the most amazing Greek ruins anywhere, the most famous of which is the Parthenon.) Elgin had (or at least claims to have had) permission from the Ottoman Empire to take stuff home with him, but a) this is one empire asking another empire if they can loot stuff from the other empire’s subjugated people, so, not exactly any moral high ground there Elgin, and b) he took a lot more stuff than the Ottomans said he could have.
Greece has been asking for those statues and sculptures to be returned since they won independence in 1832. That’s right, 1832, 190 years ago. The British Museum has had a number of excuses over the years, one of the biggies of the late 20th Century being “we couldn’t possibly give them back because Athens doesn’t have a nice enough museum to display them” and ignoring Greece’s response of “we will BUILD a museum just for them if you will just give us our damn stuff back!“
Finally, Greece said “fuck you” and built a museum at the bottom of the Acropolis called the Acropolis museum. It is huge, it is gorgeous, the collection of objects is amazing and the educational bits (“this is what it is and why it matters”) are really well done. It’s probably one of the best archaeological museums in the world; it definitely is the best collection of ancient Greek artifacts in the world, both for the size of the collection and the way it’s displayed.
Oh. And it is amazingly passive-aggressive. Every single piece of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum has an empty spot on display waiting for the piece to be returned to Greece. For example, there are a lot of pieces where Elgin took, say, the nicest (or easiest to remove) one of a set. The column/statue in the OP’s image is one of these. Friezes from the roof of the Parthenon are another example. The Acropolis Museum displays each one of these sets with space for the stolen pieces, along with a picture of what the stolen piece looks like and where it is. It is a giant middle finger at the British Museum, disguised as helpful information.
There’s no chance that the British Museum will return any of this in the next generation. It’s not up to the curators at the British Museum; they don’t get any say in this. The board of governors of the British Museum is made up of old posh English people who genuinely believe that the Empire was awesome and England has a perfect right to everything in the British Museum. They have set policies about what can and can’t be removed from the collection, and according to those policies nothing of any historical or monetary value can be given away or sold. And they actively promote the idea that their predecessors had a perfect right to loot the cultural heritage of the world, and that the museum has a perfect right to keep it forever. The only way to get anything out of the British Museum and back to its rightful place would be to completely replace the entire board of the museum with new people who think completely differently. And that’s not happening any time soon, alas.
By the way, the British argument that Greeks wouldn’t know how to care for the antiquities……. Greece has 206 archaeological museums. It’s not only incredibly demeaning as an argument, it’s also straight out false and misleading.
Athens: Three Views of the Acropolis (with Frankish tower still standing), and the Temple of Zeus (with later brickwork still on top).
Mostly know for his nonsense poems (The Owl and the Pussycat), Lear was a prolific and talented watercolourist. He visited Greece in 1848-9, and, both during and after his trip, created numerous sketches and watercolours. These show some views of Athens, around 15yrs after it was instated as the capital of Greece.
You can read more about Lear’s trip to Greece here.
Centaurs and Lapiths. From the South Metopes of Parthenon, Acropolis, Athens (Greece), c. 5th century BC.
The metopes on the south side of the Parthenon showed the contest between Centaurs and Lapiths. Centaurs were half men and half horse and Lapiths were an Aeolian tribe. The contest was won by Lapiths but there were many Lapiths who were also killed in this battle. Centauromachy was the mythical war between Centaurs and Lapiths.
