Since 2009, the day before the summer solstice has marked an important day of celebration for the promoters of the restitution of the Elgin Marbles to Greece. It was 16 years ago, in fact, that the new Acropolis Museum in Athens was officially opened, marking a turning point in the two-century-old history of Greek aggression against our cultural heritage. One of the main arguments used in Britain to resist the Hellenic and Philellenic initiative, that the Greeks had no museum to properly host and care for the Marbles, was shattered by the hard, angular shapes of the ultramodern building designed by Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi. With a cynical U-turn, those same people who had until then vociferously insisted that not having the perfect museum was no argument to deny the coveted transfer of the sculptures to Athens, almost instantly pivoted to insisting that having the perfect museum leaves now no excuses not to enact said transfer once and for all.
But is it really the perfect museum? This author contends that not only is it not perfect, it is not even good. To some extent, I don’t even consider it a museum at all.
The repatriationist propaganda ceaselessly repeats the mantra that the Marbles must go back, because Athens now has a museum built specifically for them. The design of the building is indeed articulated around the idea of the Parthenon, with the top floor of the museum an exact replica of the dimensions, orientation, and general arrangement of the main temple on the Acropolis. But the similarities end pretty much here, and the visitor is offered more the impression of walking into an airport terminal adorned with some fancy art pieces than a museum space. Architecture enthusiast and journalist Simon Jenkins famously compared the building to “the police headquarters of a banana republic”, saying that he “found the British Museum’s bland and gloomy presentation of the marbles somehow more pristine than these souls lost in a modernist wilderness”. In his scathing review, Jenkins slammed the project as “the worst case of architectural egotism”, with Tshumi “determined to push himself forward as a rival to the builders of the Acropolis” and producing a “big and brutal” building “screaming the supremacy of Big Modernism over the serene stones of the Acropolis”.
The physical appearance of the museum is just the culmination of decades of prevarications, the embodiment of a steely political diktat: the new museum must happen, no matter what. This submission of the cultural to the ideological is evident in almost every aspect of the construction, and the bullying contrast between the glossy imperial destroyer and the low-density urban context it lives in is only matched by the ruthless efficiency of a government which razed to the ground an entire city block of 19th-century historic buildings to make way for it. Only three of them have survived the devastation, thanks to the endless legal warfare waged by a civic society puzzled by the notion that you needed to destroy culture to make way for culture.
Okay, the building is ugly. But what about the exhibition? Well, it’s worse
The same inflexible approach has been taken for the archaeological wonderland that emerged while digging the new museum foundations: an entire neighbourhood of the ancient city, with its once-vibrant streets, luxurious late Roman houses, and thriving shops. In one of the ironic reversals that are so characteristic of this design, that same Attic light that fills the top floor to inundate a frieze that was once in darkness is instead denied to the ancient streets below, which were once full of it. Jenkins, who was outraged that the area had been “consigned to a surreal dungeon”, will have had the late consolation of knowing that since last year this part of the museum is now accessible to visitors, even if still enclosed by thick concrete screens and stabbed everywhere with grey pillars the size of a centenary tree.
Okay, the building is ugly. But what about the exhibition? Well, it’s worse.
One of the main features of the museum is the hall dedicated to the archaic sculpture, populated by a forest of male and female statues on their slender plinths. While this arrangement is intended to replicate the probable impression a visitor to the Acropolis would have had at the end of the 6th century BC, the interpretation apparatus is intentionally kept at a minimum, and the modern visitor is largely left wondering what to make of such variety and abundance. That teaching is not the primary mission of this establishment is better clarified by another example: the famous Erechtheion caryatids. These stone female figures, which originally adorned the northern porch of the Erechtheion temple on the Acropolis, are nothing but dressed-up pillars, and they can be fully understood in their function as architectural elements only in connection with the load they bear on their head. This is the way that the British Museum displays the Caryatid from the Elgin collection. What did they do in Athens? A U-shaped plinth displaying the five remaining stone maidens, and nothing else. The architectonic function of these figures, their very sense, is completely lost, and the scene is more reminiscent of a catwalk than an architectural reconstruction.
The same cavalier attitude seems to have been taken with regard to another masterpiece of Greek architecture, the temple of Athena Nike. You may miss it, as it is uncomfortably placed under the escalators. But if you manage to find it, you will notice that the fragments of the South frieze are almost joined together as if the temple were just a little square. What you may not see is that two more long blocks should fill that gap: the ones that are in the British Museum and that the Hellenic Republic is not even asking for. For a long time, in Britain, we have been accused of misrepresenting the frieze of the Parthenon by showing the blocks in the British Museum all joining together as if that was all that survived of it, and it is definitely sound criticism towards a design finalised in 1939. Yet they did the same in 2009. The eagle-eyed among the visitors will have an opportunity to see all the surviving frieze together, in the proper order, on the reconstructed temple on the rock, where it has been reassembled in the form of concrete casts.
To quote the title of a famous book by French libertarian economist Frederic Bastiat, there is “What is Seen and What is Not Seen”, and one must pay attention to both. Minimal reference is made, for example, throughout the museum to the imperial nature of the power wielded by Athens over its allies during its golden period. You will have to learn by yourself the history of economic exploitation of the Athenian Empire, and how the beautiful monuments of the Periclean building programme were mainly financed with the money of the alliance. To frame the situation for a contemporary reader, it was as if Donald Trump forced every NATO member to use the dollar, transferred all the alliance money to Washington, and then rebuilt the White House in gold with it. Ah, and let’s not forget the repression of recalcitrant allies through the occasional bloodbath.
If you are looking for empires while walking through the museum, there is one empire that gets all the attention: the British Empire. Not the Roman one, not the Byzantine one, and certainly not the Ottoman Empire, all of whom receive very limited attention while on your way out. But Lord Elgin, the British Empire, and the removal of the sculptures from the ruined Parthenon, will be described with all sorts of particulars, highlighting every missing piece that is now in London, every trace of damage — real or imagined — created during the three years that Elgin’s artists and workmen were allowed to operate on the Acropolis. One would be tempted to think that the most significant act of destruction involving the Parthenon was the massive explosion that transformed it from an ammunition depot to a wreck in 1687. After visiting the Acropolis Museum, you will be excused for thinking that Elgin created more damage with his little finger than a conflagration that killed 300 people and opened up like a coconut a humongous marble temple. Such is the power of modern museum storytelling.
The Acropolis Museum is a propaganda operation in a premium package
I could go on, explaining how the temporary exhibitions are designed to exalt an imaginary unbroken continuity between the Athens of Pericles and that of Mitsotakis, or to counter specific elements of the British narrative around the Elgin Marbles with convoluted and scientifically unsound juxtapositions of carefully selected historical elements. But I think you get the gist. The Acropolis Museum is a propaganda operation in a premium package, a place of indoctrination built with public money (both Greek and EU funds) for a public purpose, the reunification of the fragments of the Parthenon, and which people are curiously even asked to pay dearly to visit. Every museum is an ideological space to some degree, I don’t deny that. The choice of the objects we display, the way they are presented, and the conscious and unconscious bias that creeps into labels and interpretation boards all reveal our own vision of the world, both the past and the present one. We accept this constraint, and honest museum professionals around the world work hard to keep these biases in check, to be truthful to the objects, and to let them tell their stories. This commitment to objectivity is less evident in this particular museum, to the point that I hesitate to call it even a museum altogether.
What makes a museum is not the security of its vaults, the size of its budget, or the technological level of its restoration labs. I am sure you could name hundreds of small local museums in Britain that could all easily prove my point. Museums should be places where we can go from the stories of objects and people to History with a capital H, from who “they” were to who “we” are. It’s not enough to build a dark modernist elephant and force it in the middle of a city, fully kitted with money and gadgets, with a bunch of attractive objects arranged to look pretty, to call it a museum. And it is definitely not enough to build such a museum to create a right to claim objects that have been legitimately acquired and held by others for more than two centuries. If that was all that was needed to create return obligations, I am sure the people of Florence would have already created one for the Mona Lisa — and you may rest assured, it would have looked a lot nicer than this one.
