Tag Archives: Athens Museums

Acropolis Museum, Athens

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Athens gift to visitors, the glass floored gallery houses relics from the slopes of the Acropolis. The transparent glass floor provides a view of an archeological excavation while the upward slope of the floor represents the ascent to the Acropolis. This is one of the best museums I’ve ever visited. It was designed by architect Bernard Tschumi with Michael Photiadis and inaugurated in the summer of 2009. The Museum hosts its collections across three levels, as well as in the archaeological excavation that lies at its foundations.

The Museum’s exhibition culminates on the third floor, in the glass-encased “Parthenon Gallery”. The relief sculptures of the Parthenon frieze depicting the Panathenaic procession are exhibited in continuous sequence along the perimeter of the external surface of the rectangular concrete core of the Gallery. The metopes, the marble slabs with relief representations from Greek mythology, are exhibited in between the stainless-steel columns of the Gallery, which are the same in number as the columns of the Parthenon. The colossal figures of the two pediments have been placed on pedestals on the east and west sides of the Gallery. The east pediment depicts the birth of the Goddess Athena, emerging from the head of her father Zeus, and the west pediment depicts the battle between Athena and Poseidon over the land of Attica. The third floor is the exact length of the Parthenon.

Many of the displays provide line drawings the exact size of a particular ancient and actual remnants attached of the drawing, providing a real look at a particular site as the excavations continue to reveal original pieces.

Drawing with original remnants attached.

Hermes It is believed that the God held a turtle in his hand. The lyre, the musical instrument invented by Hermes was made from the turtle shell. Second half of the 5th cent. BC (Acr. 1346)

Amid the treasures are video displays, 3 D projections and you can tour virtually the Archaic Gallery and the Parthenon Gallery. The “walk-through” feature of the project uses Google’s Street View technology. Explore physical and contextual information provided about the collection of the Acropolis Museum. The virtual images of artworks are reproduced at extremely high quality.

The Six Sisters of the Acropolis

From the NY Times article on the Six Sisters: For 2,500 years, the six sisters stood unflinching atop the Acropolis, as the fires of war blazed around them, bullets nicked their robes, and bombs scarred their curvaceous bodies. When one of them was kidnapped in the 19th century, legend had it that the other five could be heard weeping in the night. But only recently have the famed Caryatid statues, among the great divas of ancient Greece, had a chance to reveal their full glory. For three and a half years, conservators at the Acropolis Museum have been cleaning the maidens, Ionic columns in female form believed to have been sculpted by Alkamenes, a student of ancient Greece’s greatest artist, Phidias. Their initial function was to prop up a part of the Erechtheion, the sacred temple near the Parthenon that paid homage to the first kings of Athens and the Greek gods Athena and Poseidon. Today they are star attractions in the museum; the originals outside were replaced with reproductions in 1979 to keep the real maidens safe. Over the centuries, a coat of black grime came to mask their beauty. Now conservators have restored them to their original ivory glow, using a specially developed laser technology.

An excellent story on the maidens in the NY Times https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/arts/design/caryatid-statues-restored-are-stars-at-athens-museum.html

The Six Sisters site at the Acropolis

During the cleaning and  restoration of the Six Sisters, which was done on site, the museum recorded the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwCNfQh8Woo&feature=youtu.be

Plan to spend several hours roaming this beautifully detailed and stylish educational museum. Not far from the Acropolis, hike the Acropolis and Parthenon grounds before the heat in the morning, lunch near the museum and spend your afternoon in the museum. See post on lunch at Gods Restaurant.

Joan Leigh Fermor: Artist and Lover. Benaki Museum

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Athens Benaki Museum Exhibition ends October 21, 2018

I had read about this exhibit months ago and was pleasantly surprised to find an hour to slip into the Benaki Musuem, just three blocks from Grande Hotel Bretagne. Joan Leigh Fermor was married to one of the most well know British travel chroniclers, Paddy Leigh Fermor. Their marriage of love, was also a marriage of artistic sharing; he a writer and she a noted photographer.

Joan Leigh Fermor: Artist and Lover. Benaki Museum, Athens

Her classic black and white photos of their years in Greece, and in particular, the Peloponnese are riveting. Everyday images of everyday people in their natural environment. An archive of the Greek landscape and its ancient sites before troves of tourists have made their visits, in a pre-digital age, she composed simple yet haunting images. A treat even if you aren’t a photographer.

From the Museum site: Joan and Paddy Leigh Fermor were united in a pact of liberty – sharing their lives, mostly in Greece, as lovers and friends. As photographer and writer, they were also artists of equal stature.

Joan was a restless rebel when she took brilliant images of the London Blitz as a symbol of all that she would be leaving behind. She met Paddy in Cairo in 1944 and soon he was following her to Athens. They travelled all over Greece before settling in the Peloponnese – in the beautiful house they built at Kardamyli and bequeathed to the Benaki Museum.

Between the 1940s and 1960s Joan took thousands of photographs of people and places as she travelled with Paddy round Greece. A few appeared in his books Mani and Roumeli; most remained unseen on her death in 2003. Her archive is held at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.

In her lifetime, Leigh Fermor was hailed—and hired—by John Betjemen and Cyril Connelly, and she was recognized as a powerful recorder of the London Blitz. But the true scale of her achievement was only realized after her death, when a treasure trove of photographs was discovered documenting the landscape and culture of Greece between 1945 and 1960. Through Leigh Fermor’s fundamentally democratic lens, we meet Cretan shepherds, Meteoran monastics, and Macedonian bear tamers. She brings the same intimate eye to architecture, while showing just as much facility in the panoramas of landscape—all clearly animated by a love of Greece. This book, drawn from a collection of five thousand images held by the National Library of Scotland, lets one see Leigh Fermor for what she was: a twentieth-century master.

If your plans lead you to the Golden city of Athens before the end of October, I encourage a visit to this extraordinary exhibit.