Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T17:16:00.121Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Behold the raking geison: the new Acropolis Museum and its context-free archaeologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Dimitris Plantzos
Dimitris Plantzos*
Affiliation:
History and Archaeology, University of Ioannina, Dourouti Campus, Ioannina GR45110, Greece (Email: [email protected])
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In December 1834 Athens became the capital city of the newly founded Hellenic Kingdom. King Otto, the Bavarian prince whose political and cultural initiative shaped much of what modern Greece is today, sought to design the new city inspired by the heavily idealised model of Classical Hellas (see Bastea 2000). The emerging capital was from the outset conceived as a heterotopia of Hellenism, a Foucauldian 'other space' devoted to Western Classicism in view of the Classical ruins it preserved. The Acropolis became, naturally, the focal point of this effort. At the same time, however, and as Greek nationalist strategies were beginning to unfold, Classical antiquity became a disputed topos, a cultural identity of sorts contested between Greece on the one hand and the 'Western world' on the other (see Yalouri 2001: 77–100). Archaeological sites thus became disputed spaces, claimed by various interested parties of national or supra-national authority wishing to impose their own views on how they should be managed — and to what ends (Loukaki 2008). The Acropolis was duly cleansed from any non-Classical antiquities and began to be constructed as an authentic Classical space, a national project still in progress. As Artemis Leontis has argued in her discussion of Greece as a heterotopic 'culture of ruins', the Acropolis of Athens, now repossessed by architectural renovation and scholarly interest, functions 'as a symbol not of Greece's ancient glory but of its modern predicament' (Leontis 1995: 40–66; see also McNeal 1991; Hamilakis 2007: 85–99).

Type
Debate
Information
Antiquity , Volume 85 , Issue 328 , June 2011 , pp. 613 - 625
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adamopoulou, M. 2010. Neo Mouseio Akropolis. Ta Nea (19 June 2010).Google Scholar
Bastea, E. 2000. The creation of modern Athens. Planning the myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Beard, M. 2003. The Parthenon. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bernard Tschumi Architects. 2010. Acropolis Museum. Available at: http://www.tschumi.com/projects/2/ (accessed 10 July 2010).Google Scholar
Bhabha, H. 1994. The location of culture. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Colla, E. 2007. Conflicted antiquities. Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian modernity. Durham (NC) & London: Duke University Press.10.1215/9780822390398CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fouseki, K. 2006. Conflicting discourses on the construction of the new Acropolis Museum: past and present. European Review of History 13(4): 533–48.10.1080/13507480601049203CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fouseki, K. 2007. Developing and integrating a conflict management model into the heritage management process: the case of the new Acropolis Museum, in Grabow, S., Hull, D., Waterton, E. (ed.) Which past, whose future: treatments of the past at the start of the 21st century: an international perspective: proceedings of a conference held at the University of York, 20-21 May 2005 (British Archaeological Reports international series 1633): 127–36. Oxford: Archaeopress.Google Scholar
Gellner, E. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Greenhalgh, P. 2005. The modern ideal. The rise and collapse of idealism in the visual arts from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism. London: V & A Publications.Google Scholar
Hamilakis, Y. 2007. The nation and its ruins: antiquity, archaeology, and national imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
James, N. 2009. The Acropolis and its new museum. Antiquity 83:1144–51.10.1017/S0003598X00099427CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, S. 2009. A banana republic police HQ maybe, but not a home for the Elgin marbles. The Guardian (22 October 2009).Google Scholar
Katimertzi, P. 2009. Akropoli. Apo ta Mnimeia sto Mouseio. Special Edition. Athens: Ta Nea.Google Scholar
Lianis, G. 2009. Pente simeia gia tin teleti egkaineion. Ta Nea (24 June 2009).Google Scholar
Leontis, A. 1995. Topographies of Hellenism: mapping the homeland. Ithaca (NY) & London: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Loukaki, A. 2008. Living ruins, value conflicts. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Mcneal, R. A. 1991. Archaeology and the destruction of the later Athenian Acropolis. Antiquity 65:49–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, T. 1991. Colonizing Egypt. Berkeley (CA) & London: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, T. 2002. Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkeley (CA) & London: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Olsen, B. 1990. Roland Barthes: from sign to text, in Tilley, C. (ed.) Reading material culture: 163–205. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Pantermalis, D. 2010. Denmark — Professor D. Pantermalis is interviewed on the new Acropolis Museum. Available at: http://omogeneia.ana-mpa.gr/press.php?id=10417 (accessed 10 July 2010) (in Greek).Google Scholar
Peckham, R. S. 2001. National histories, natural states. Nationalism and the politics of place in Greece. London & New York: I. B. Tauris.Google Scholar
Plantzos, D. 2008. Archaeology and Hellenic identity, 1896-2004: the frustrated vision, in Damaskos, D. & Plantzos, D. (ed.) A singular antiquity. Archaeology and Hellenic identity in twentieth-century Greece: 10–30. Athens: Benaki Museum.Google Scholar
Plantzos, D. 2009. I Kivotos kai to Ethnos: ena sholio gia tin ipodochi tou Neou Mouseiou Akropoleos. Sichrona Themata 106:14–18.Google Scholar
Potts, A. 1994. Flesh and the ideal. Winckelmann and the origins of art history. NewHaven (CT) & London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Said, E. W. 1993. Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Tsiros, G. 2009. Mouseio Akropolis. Oi horoi, ta ekthemata, oi syntelestes. Kathimerini (special edition K321, 26 July 2009).Google Scholar
Yalouri, E. 2001. The Acropolis: global fame, local claim. Oxford & New York: Berg.Google Scholar
YSMA. 2010. Service for the conservation of the Acropolis monuments. Available at: http://www.ysma.gr/En/index.asp (accessed 10 July 2010).Google Scholar