Wife of dead Hellenic Navy officer, gives birth to their son 13 days after his death, the baby boy has been named after his father, Konstantinos Pananas.
On Thursday 11th of February, 3 officers of the Greek Navy lost their lives in a terrible accident near the isle of Kinaros under planned exercise on helicopter Agusta Bell 12
Copilot of the Helicopter Konstantinos Pananas (center) and Warrant Officer Eleftherios Evaggelou (right) were the first whose bodies were found , while the body of Pilot Anastasios Evaggelou (left) was found a day later.
13 days after the tragic accident, the wife of Konstantinos Pananas gave birth to their second son, a healthy newborn, the photo was uploaded by her doctor and close family friend as a farewell to his deceased friend.
“ Τοday I got a daughter, and a hero grandson, Marianna and your newborn son. Commander Constantine Pananas, my friend Kostas, allow me an also mere mortal … your trips were not recreational journeys, but journeys of faith to the task you sworn…journeys in the vast Hellenic blue.. they were journeys of an eagle above the aegean to protect us! Your long trips to the Hellenic seas brought you closer to us, to your Marianna, your Panagiotis and your little newborn hero that I held today in my arms…he will hear about the legend of his father with his friends but he will never have the opportunity to hug you! Take care of us Commander! Demetris Kakaletris. “
Pair of Hellenistic Greek gold, glass, and stone earrings featuring an Egyptian Atef crown motif, c. 3rd-2nd centuries BCE. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“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.
Empedocles (pictured), born in around 494 BCE, spoke of four unchangeable elements—fire, air, water, and earth—which are pulled into war between two divine powers, Love and Strife. The result of this constant war is a unity of opposites. In comparison to our theories now, ideas from the past can sound bizarre—even fantastical. But we’re always in debt to the past.
We reap the benefits of generations of thinkers who philosophised and recorded their findings before us. Fragments of verse and poem were handed between generations. Songs were shared. Sheets were stained with quill, pencil, and pen. Even if only a fraction remains, we deduce and speculate.
