Greeks use museum opening to call for treasures' return

ATHENS - Gods, heroes and long-dead mortals stepped off their plinths into the evening sky of Athens during the lavish launch of the new Acropolis Museum, a decades-old dream that Greece hopes will also help reclaim a cherished part of its heritage from Britain.

The digital animated display of artefacts on the museum walls ends years of delays and wrangling over the ultra-modern building, set among apartment blocks and neoclassical houses at the foot of the Acropolis hill.

The nearly €3 million ($6.5 million) opening ceremony was attended by 400 guests, including European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, Unesco Director-General Koichiro Matsuura, and foreign heads of state and government.

Conspicuously, there were no government officials from Britain, which has repeatedly refused to repatriate dozens of 2500-year-old sculptures from the Parthenon temple that are held in the British Museum.

President Karolos Papoulias said Greeks thought of the Acropolis monuments as their "identity and pride", and renewed the demand for the missing marble works, displayed in London for the past 200 years.

"The whole world can now see the most important sculptures from the Parthenon together," he said.

"Some are missing. It is time to heal the wounds on the monument by returning the marbles that belong to it."

Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said the sculptures "will inevitably return", but ruled out Greece acknowledging the British Museum's legal title to the works - as requested by officials in London as a precondition for any loan. To drive the point home, Samaras fitted a small marble head of a goddess from another Greek museum into its original position among the Parthenon sculptures on display.

"May we join up more original pieces in the future, to reunite the Parthenon," he said.

Crouching 300m from the Parthenon, the €130 million museum provides an airy setting for some of the best surviving works of classical sculpture that once adorned the Acropolis.

Printed glass panels filter the harsh sunlight while revealing the ancient citadel in the background. The internal lighting projects the battered statues outward at night, contrasting with the floodlit ruins on the low hill.

And with a special glass hall designed to showcase all the surviving Parthenon sculptures in their original alignment, the building is Greece's answer to the argument that it had nowhere to safely house those sawn off the temple in the early 1800s by British diplomat Lord Elgin.

THE PARTHENON

Built: At the height of Athens' glory, between 447-432BC, in honour of the city's patron goddess, Athena.

History: Despite its burning by invading Goths in 267AD, conversion into a Christian church in the 6th century and Ottoman occupation from the 15th century - when it served as a gunpowder store - it survived largely intact until a Venetian cannon shot caused a huge explosion in 1687.

- AP