A musical tribute to our beloved Melina, known to the world as Melina Mercouri - singer, actress, politician - the Last Greek Goddess...
This is a collection of our favourite songs including one sung for her by her stepson - French singer Joe Dassin...you'll know it for sure...Γαρύφαλλο στ'αφτί
Listen, reminisce and smile...that's what she would have wanted us to do.
Honouring Melina Mercouri - the Last Greek Goddess
The Poster created for her Mayoral Campaign in 1990 was later issued
as part of a set of commemorative stamps in her honour
The local elections in Greece recently saw a change of power in Greece's two main centres, for the first time since 1986...
In the capital, Athens the sitting Mayor, Nikitas Kaklamanis, a former Minister with Nea Democratia, was defeated by outsider Giorgos Kaminis, the former Ombudsman whose candidacy was supported by PASOK and the left coalitions...whilst Yiannis Boutaris, of the reknowned Boutari Wines, on a similar basis, ousted Nea Dimokratia's sitting Mayor Vassilis Papageorgopoulos in Thessaloniki...
As the elections came and went and a new Mayor was elected for Athens, some of us couldn't help but think of the only woman who really deserved to have been the Mayor of Athens but wasn't, Melina Mercouri, the ultimate Athenian, the last Greek Goddess, someone who loved the city and would have done wonders for Athens' image and identity...
Her vision was focused on showcasing Greece's rich heritage - emphasising the beauty of Athens' many classical and historical monuments, uniting Athens' many Archaeological sites, reuniting the Parthenon Sculptures, and adding culture and poetry to everyday living and education...
One thing is for sure, she certainly wouldn't have allowed her beloved Athens to get to the level it is today, with scenes such as the one pictured below an everyday occurrence which totally mars the beauty of the newly restored Athenian Trilogy buildings in one of the most beautiful streets of Athens, Panepistimiou... and not only!
Photo by Alexandros Filippidis which appeared in the Kathimerini on Sunday
Melina, born Maria Amalia Mercouri in Athens in 1920, was the daughter of Stamatis Mercouris, a former cavalry officer, member of Parliament for the Democratic Socialist Party of Greece and former Minister for Public Order of Greece, and the granddaughter of Spyros Mercouris, one of the most successful Mayors of Athens.
Melina worshipped her paternal grandfather who played such a significant role in her early childhood. In turn, Spyros Mercouris adored his granddaughter and took her with him almost everywhere he went - the sight of a young Melina with her grandfather was an endearing one, and one which would inspire the song Melina Melinaki which also became very popular in France.
A well-known and talented actress, Melina was internationally acclaimed for her portrayal of a woman of pleasure in Never on Sunday, a film which was a milestone in Greek film history but she also had many other performances in her repertoire, both in films and in the theatre, modern and classical.
During the years of the Military Junta in Greece, while in exile abroad, Melina also recorded several albums which became very popular... her sultry, husky voice giving the songs an extra special dimension.
One of the most popular was a 1973 album with fellow Global Greek, composer Vangelis, 'Si Melina M'Etait Contee', which featured this song , one of her most beautiful ...
Athenes, ma Ville
Ma ville,c'est bon ne plus te voir en rêve
Ma ville, regarde le soleil se lève
Je te salue, toi mon ami, ma soeur
belle endormie mais qui attend son heure
Ma ville, écoute au creux de tes ruelles
Ma ville la voix de tes enfants t'appelle
réveille-toi réveille-toi
Athèna Athèna
réveille-toi réveille-toi
Athèna Athèna
Ma ville que c'est un joli jour pour naitre
dore le pain Pâques est enfin venue
tire le vin qui fait chanter tes rues
Ma ville écoute au creux de tes ruelles
ma ville la voix de tes enfants t'appelle
réveille-toi réveille-toi
Athèna Athèna
réveille-toi réveille-toi
Athèna Athèna
réveille-toi réveille-toi
Athèna Athèna
réveille-toi réveille-toi
Athèna Athèna
réveille-toi réveille-toi
Athèna Athèna
Famous for her anti-dictatorship stance during the Military Junta, she was deprived of her Greek citizenship and denied entry into Greece from 1967 to 1974. Her response to that was a simple
'I was born Greek and I will die Greek.
Mr Pattakos was born a dictator and a dictator he will die'
Her biography, appropriately enough, has the same name, I Was Born Greek...
When democracy was restored to her homeland Melina returned to Greece and entered politics, becoming Minister of Culture in the first PASOK Government and retaining that position until she died, except for a short break between 1990 and 1993. From that position she took on the British Museum as she campaigned long and hard for the return of the stolen Parthenon Sculptures now on display in the British Museum.
Melina didn't live to see her dream become reality. She died in 1994 but her cause was rapidly gaining support around the world and her vision of a Museum to house the Repatriated Sculptures materialised on 20 June 2009 when the magnificent New Acropolis Museum opened its doors in Athens.
The pressure on the British is unrelenting and grows daily, with the London Olympics in 2012 an ideal moment for initiatives to be taken.
Melina, our immortal Melina, will be waiting, just as we are... as she said when she addressed the UNESCO Conference in Mexico in 1982...
'You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles stand for us. They are our pride. Our sacrifice. Our ultimate symbol of nobility. It is a requiem to our democratic philosophy, our ambition and our name. They are the essence of our Hellenic Being. If you ask me whether I will be alive when the Marbles return to Greece, I tell you, yes, I will be.
But even if I'm not, I will be born again.
When the Sculptures come home to Athens, so will I'
Twenty-six countries, among them Greece, have joined forces in a coordinated campaign for the return of their stolen antiquities, during an international conference in Cairo this week on recovering stolen ancient artefacts from abroad attended by antiquities officials, deputy culture ministers and museum directors.
The first step of the initiative is to draft a catalogue containing the priority stolen antiquities that the countries are demanding be repatriated, while the conference delegates also discussed proposals and recommendations that will be submitted to United Nations' cultural body, UNESCO, aiming at amendment of a 1970 convention banning the ownership or export of stolen antiquities acquired after that date in order to facilitate the repatriation of the antiquities to their countries of origin.
Seven delegate countries -- Egypt, Greece, Guatemala, Libya, Nigeria, Peru and Syria -- of the 22 countries in attendance at the Cairo conference, have already submitted their lists with the antiquities designated as "top priority" they seek to be returned, while the remaining countries have a month to submit their own lists, according to Egypt's antiquities chief Dr. Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the country's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA).
For Greece, the priority continues to be the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum, which it has been campaigning for over the past 30 years.
Announcing the expanded campaign at a joint press conference with the officials from the US, Greece and Italy, Hawass noted that "Greece was fighting alone, and Italy was fighting alone", but "now, for the first time, we are united...we will fight together".
Greece's representative Elena Korka, who heads the country's cultural heritage protection directorate, told reporters that the Cairo conference "shows the importance many countries place on this matter and enables us to join forces".
Christos Tsiolkas is 'one of Australia's pre-eminent contemporary novelists' (The Age).
Born, raised and educated in Melbourne where he continues to live, Christos is one of our Global Greek Writers and one of twelve of Australia’s best writers who recently came together at Melbourne Town Hall for a night of celebration and reflection, sharing the common and different experiences that define Australia's past and present, to mark the opening of Australia's newest cultural institution, The Wheeler Centre.
It was a night of storytelling, each writer reflecting on those tales that have been handed down to them through the generations, each giving voice to an inheritance of wisdom, of understanding, of identity.
This is Greek Australian Christos Tsiolkas' very moving story, one that many of us in our Global Greek World can relate to and we thank him! (Thanks Konstantina M, Athens, for drawing it to our attention)
Teachings of my grandmothers
I NEVER really knew my grandparents. Both my grandfathers died in Greece before I ever visited there, and I met my grandmothers only twice in my life, once when I visited as a boy in 1975, and then again as a young adult in 1990.
For many of us, migration and distance has shaped the nature of our families and the cultures we believe we belong to. The stories I have of my grandparents' lives are second-hand, filtered through the memories, longings and secrets of my parents.
I am grateful that I did have an opportunity to meet my grandmothers. They both shared the same name, Spiridoula. But even those encounters were made difficult by the limitations of my Greek and the overwhelming chasm of experience that separated myself, a privileged child of the First World, and those two women, each born on the eve of the 20th century, in a peasant Eastern Mediterranean world that was to be torn apart by two Balkan wars, two world wars, an occupation, two dictatorships, a civil war.
I remember sitting in a kitchen in Athens with my maternal grandmother, and she crying, wanting to know why her daughter had only visited her once in all the time she had been a migrant in Australia.
I tried to explain the distances involved, the expense.
My uncle Mitso, who was sitting with us, took me aside and explained that once in the early '70s he was driving his mother from the village to Athens when they came to a fork in the road.
My giagia asked, ''Mitso, if we turn left instead of right, can we go and visit Georgia in Australia?'' You have to remember, Christo, my Uncle said to me, this is a woman born in a time when women were doomed to illiteracy and the shadows. Your giagia can't even read a map. And look at you, you are now a university student, you want to be a writer. You don't know how proud that makes us. But if you ever forget where you come from, tha se sfaxo, I will slaughter you.
I want to share with you a moment with this grandmother. Not anything she said but something she showed me.
I was a 10-year-old in the village, visiting from Melbourne, and my grandmother took me to the chicken coop to get a bird to prepare for dinner. She pointed to the one of the chooks and said, Go, catch it and kill it.
Now I was an inner-city Australian child and poultry and meat was something I believed just magically appeared on butcher's slabs and supermarket shelves. My giagia pointed to the bird and I shook my head.
No, I insisted, I can't do it.
She was appalled. What do you mean, she said, you are nearly a man and you don't know how to kill a chicken? What has your mother been teaching you?
She adjusted her headscarf, hitched up her heavy black mourning skirt, chased after the chicken and brought it to me.
Now, she ordered, wring its neck.
I started to weep. The bird was fluttering in her hand and I was too scared to go near it. Taking pity on me, she ordered me to sit down next to her and proceeded to break the bird's neck. It was one swift stroke, a wrenching motion and the head pulled away from the body. There was blood and the beast continued to struggle in her hand. By now I was howling.
She ignored my tears and started to tell me how to prepare the bird for cooking. The hanging of the body in the cool of the cellar, putting the pot on the fire, placing the bird in the near boiling water, plucking the feathers first from the wings, the legs and then finally from the breasts.
When my mother arrived back from visiting her sister she was horrified.
What have you been showing Christo?
Something you should have showed him a long time ago, my giagia admonished her daughter.
That night we ate roast chook and I learnt something about the real meaning of placing food on the table.
I look at my nieces as they play with my father and mother, watch my aunt surrounded by her grandkids. I feel fortunate to have met my grandmothers, spent time with them, I feel a sadness that I could not have known them better, that I never met my grandfathers. I wonder what I could have learnt from them about war and occupation, dictatorship and democracy, poverty and suffering; but I also miss having been instructed on the smaller, just as important stuff, like how to prepare the grapes off the vine for wine, dry tobacco, build a shelter, tend a vegetable crop. I watch my nieces play with my father and mother and think this is what unconditional love is.
A few years ago a woman brought a dying bird into the veterinary clinic in which I am employed. The vet said there's nothing we can do, we have to put it down. She explained that we could inject it with litho barb but it is easy to miss a vital organ in such a small creature and it can be a horrible death as it literally drowns and suffocates from the poison.
The most humane thing to do is to break its neck, she explained, do you want me to show you how to do that?
It's OK, I answered, I can do it, my grandmother taught me...
Watch and listen to Christos Tsiolkas as he tells this wonderful story
To read the original article at The Age, Click Here
About Christos Tsiolkas
Greek-Australian author and playwright, essayist and screen writer, Christos Tsiolkas' first novel Loaded (1995) was made into the feature film Head-On (1998) by fellow Greek Australian, director Ana Kokkinos, starring Alex Dimitriades. His works are considered to be autobiographical to a certain extent, drawing on his many experiences growing up as a member of a cultural minority in Australia.
Other novels include The Jesus Man (1999), Dead Europe (2005), which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award, and his most recent novel The Slap, where a man slaps a child (not his own) at a suburban barbeque, the consequences of which reverberate through the lives of all of the witnesses to the incident.
The Slap won the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009 for best novel in the South-East Asia and South Pacific area.
In an interview with Neos Kosmos Newspaper in Australia, after receiving his award, we were delighted to read his answer to the question
What will you ask the Queen when you meet her?
(traditionally Commonwealth Writers Prize winners get to meet Queen Elisabeth, the Head of the Commonwealth)
I will ask her to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece!
From all of us in the Global Greek World, Christo, we congratulate you on your success, we thank you for the support and hope you do just that!
One of our Global Greeks, renowned film producer Costas Gavras, producer of 'Z' and 'Missing' produced the magnificent video which we have embedded below for the Cultural Olympiad of Athens, 2003 - 2004. It eloquently depicts the history of the Parthenon and it's trial and tribulations through the centuries. During the video you can hear the following excerpt from 'The Curse of Minerva' written by Lord Byron in 1811 being recited.
Byron passionately opposed Lord Elgin's removal of the Parthenon marbles from Greece and denounced it at every opportunity.He wrote this poem, The Curse of Minerva, castigating Elgin's shameful actions in removing the friezes and metopes so integral to the Parthenon.
"Mortal!" -- 'twas thus she spake -- "that blush of shame
Proclaims thee Briton, once a noble name;
First of the mighty, foremost of the free,
Now honour'd less by all, and least by me;
Chief of thy foes shall Pallas still be found.
Seek'st thou the cause of loathing? --look around.
Lo! here, despite of war and wasting fire,
I saw successive tyrannies expire.
'Scaped from the ravage of the Turk and Goth,
Thy country sends a spoiler worse than both.
Survey this vacant, violated fane;
Recount the relics torn that yet remain:
These Cecrops placed, this Pericles adorn'd,
That Adrian rear'd when drooping Science mourn'd.
What more I owe let gratitude attest--
Know, Alaric and Elgin did the rest.
That all may learn from whence the plunderer came,
The insulted wall sustains his hated name:
For Elgin's fame thus grateful Pallas pleads,
Below, his name--above, behold his deeds!
Be ever hailed with equal honour here
The Gothic monarch and the Pictish peer:
arms gave the first his right, the last had none,
But basely stole what less barbarians won.
So when the lion quits his fell repast,
Next prowls the wolf, the filthy jackal last;
Some calm spectator, as he takes his view,
In silent indignation mix'd with grief,
Admires the plunder, but abhors the thief.
In 1812, Lord Byron went on to write 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, with the same reproach and recrimination for such an ignoble deed on the part of his countryman!
Cold is the heart, fair Greece, that looks on thee,Nor feels as lovers o’er the dust they loved;Dull is the eye that will not weep to seeThy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removedBy British hands, which it had best behov’dTo guard those relics ne’er to be restored.Curst be the hour when their isle they roved,And once again thy hapless bosom gored,And snatch’d thy shrinking Gods to northern climes abhorr’d!
We at Global Greek World are grateful that Greece has had such wonderful friends, truly great men and women, and that Philhellenes such as Lord Byron were outspoken critics of Elgin's actions and condemned these actions so vehemently!
We continue to consider Elgin's action criminal and those of the British Museum, which like an ostrich hiding it's head in the sand determined to ignore the international wave of protests, self-centred at the very least! To the British Government, the only body with any real power to do something about it - we reiterate:
We thank Global Greek writer, Alexis Mantheakis, for allowing the use of his oh so evocative photo of the British Museum. Alexis recently launched a new initiative for the Repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles , gathering more than 100,000 members on Facebook! To read about this Campaign Click here
This magnificent photo of Melina graces the Acropolis Metro Station in Athens and was taken by her personal photographer Ilias Anagnostopoulos
It is nearly three decades since Melina Mercouri, as Minister of Culture in Greece's first Socialist Government in 1981, brought the issue of the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles to the attention of the international community, giving the cause the international status it needed and succeeded in having them referred to as the Parthenon Marbles rather than the Elgin Marbles, in her glorious and inimitable fashion.
Melina's vision, which also became that of her partner, world renowned director Jules Dassin, was to see the Parthenon Marbles reunited in a Museum to be built in Athens just for that reason. Dassin's efforts continued after Melina's death in 1974, establishing the Melina Mercouri Foundation in Greece, to carry on Melina's work and keep the pressure on the British Government! Unfortunately neither Melina or Jules lived to see the opening of the New Acropolis Museum, but we are all here to continue Melina's campaign and keep sending out our message
There is no excuse anymore - Bring the Parthenon Marbles HOME!!!
On the eve of the opening of the New Acropolis Museum and among the first to visit Greece’s latest cultural jewel, devoted to the Parthenon and other temples, noted British born American writer Christopher Hitchens, took the opportunity of addressing the issue of the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles once again, and writes the following for the latest edition of Vanity Fair.
The Lovely Stones - by Christopher Hitchens for Vanity Fair July 2009
The great classicist A. W. Lawrence (illegitimate younger brother of the even more famously illegitimate T.E. “of Arabia”) once remarked of the Parthenon that it is “the one building in the world which may be assessed as absolutely right.” I was considering this thought the other day as I stood on top of the temple with Maria Ioannidou, the dedicated director of the Acropolis Restoration Service, and watched the workshop that lay below and around me. Everywhere there were craftsmen and -women, toiling to get the Parthenon and its sister temples ready for viewing by the public this summer. There was the occasional whine of a drill and groan of a crane, but otherwise this was the quietest construction site I have ever seen—or, rather, heard. Putting the rightest, or most right, building to rights means that the workers must use marble from a quarry in the same mountain as the original one, that they must employ old-fashioned chisels to carve, along with traditional brushes and twigs, and that they must study and replicate the ancient Lego-like marble joints with which the master builders of antiquity made it all fit miraculously together.
Don’t let me blast on too long about how absolutely heart-stopping the brilliance of these people was. But did you know, for example, that the Parthenon forms, if viewed from the sky, a perfect equilateral triangle with the Temple of Aphaea, on the island of Aegina, and the Temple of Poseidon, at CapeSounion? Did you appreciate that each column of the Parthenon makes a very slight inward incline, so that if projected upward into space they would eventually steeple themselves together at a symmetrical point in the empyrean? The “rightness” is located somewhere between the beauty of science and the science of beauty.
With me on my tour was Nick Papandreou, son and grandson of prime ministers and younger brother of the Socialist opposition leader, who reminded me that the famously fluted columns are made not of single marble shafts but of individually carved and shaped “drums,” many of them still lying around looking to be re-assembled. On his last visit, he found a graffito on the open face of one such. A certain Xanthias, probably from Thrace, had put his name there, not thinking it would ever be seen again once the next drum was joined on. Then it surfaced after nearly 2,500 years, to be briefly glimpsed (by men and women who still speak and write a version of Xanthias’s tongue) before being lost to view once more, this time for good. On the site, a nod of respect went down the years, from one proud Greek worker to another.
The original construction of the Parthenon involved what I call Periclean Keynesianism: the city needed to recover from a long and ill-fought war against Persia and needed also to give full employment (and a morale boost) to the talents of its citizens. Over tremendous conservative opposition, Pericles in or about the year 450 b.c. pushed through the Athenian Assembly a sort of stimulus package which proposed a labor-intensive reconstruction of what had been lost or damaged in the Second Persian War. As Plutarch phrases it in his Pericles:
The house-and-home contingent, no whit less than the sailors and sentinels and soldiers, might have a pretext for getting a beneficial share of the public wealth. The materials to be used were stone, bronze, ivory, gold, ebony and cypress-wood; the arts which should elaborate and work up these materials were those of carpenter, molder, bronze-smith, stone-cutter, dyer, veneerer in gold and ivory, painter, embroiderer, embosser, to say nothing of the forwarders and furnishers of the material It came to pass that for every age almost, and every capacity, the city’s great abundance was distributed and shared by such demands.
When we think of Athens in the fifth century b.c., we think chiefly of the theater of Euripides and Sophocles and of philosophy and politics—specifically democratic politics, of the sort that saw Pericles repeatedly re-elected in spite of complaints that he was overspending. And it’s true that Antigone was first performed as the Parthenon was rising, and Medea not all that long after the temple was finished. From drama to philosophy: Socrates himself was also a stonemason and sculptor, and it seems quite possible that he too took part in raising the edifice. So Greece might have something to teach us about the arts of recovery as well. As the author of The Stones of Athens, R. E. Wycherley, puts it:
In some sense, the Parthenon must have been the work of a committee It was the work of the whole Athenian people, not merely because hundreds of them had a hand in building it, but because the assembly was ultimately responsible, confirmed appointments, and sanctioned and scrutinized the expenditure of every drachma.
I have visited many of the other great monuments of antiquity, from Luxor and Karnak and the pyramids to Babylon and Great Zimbabwe, and their magnificence is always compromised by the realization that slaves did the heavy lifting and they were erected to show who was boss. The Parthenon is unique because, though ancient Greece did have slavery to some extent, its masterpiece also represents the willing collective work of free people. And it is open to the light and to the air: “accessible,” if you like, rather than dominating. So that to its rightness you could tentatively add the concept of “rights,” as Periclean Greeks began dimly to formulate them for the first time.
Not that the beauty and symmetry of the Parthenon have not been abused and perverted and mutilated. Five centuries after the birth of Christianity the Parthenon was closed and desolated. It was then “converted” into a Christian church, before being transformed a thousand years later into a mosque—complete with minaret at the southwest corner—after the Turkish conquest of the Byzantine Empire. Turkish forces also used it for centuries as a garrison and an arsenal, with the tragic result that in 1687, when Christian Venice attacked the Ottoman Turks, a powder magazine was detonated and huge damage inflicted on the structure. Most horrible of all, perhaps, the Acropolis was made to fly a Nazi flag during the German occupation of Athens. I once had the privilege of shaking the hand of Manolis Glezos, the man who climbed up and tore the swastika down, thus giving the signal for a Greek revolt against Hitler.
The damage done by the ages to the building, and by past empires and occupations, cannot all be put right. But there is one desecration and dilapidation that can at least be partially undone. Early in the 19th century, Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin, sent a wrecking crew to the Turkish-occupied territory of Greece, where it sawed off approximately half of the adornment of the Parthenon and carried it away. As with all things Greek, there were three elements to this, the most lavish and beautiful sculptural treasury in human history. Under the direction of the artistic genius Phidias, the temple had two massive pediments decorated with the figures of Pallas Athena, Poseidon, and the gods of the sun and the moon. It then had a series of 92 high-relief panels, or metopes, depicting a succession of mythical and historical battles. The most intricate element was the frieze, carved in bas-relief, which showed the gods, humans, and animals that made up the annual Pan-Athens procession: there were 192 equestrian warriors and auxiliaries featured, which happens to be the exact number of the city’s heroes who fell at the Battle of Marathon. Experts differ on precisely what story is being told here, but the frieze was quite clearly carved as a continuous narrative. Except that half the cast of the tale is still in Bloomsbury, in London, having been sold well below cost by Elgin to the British government in 1816 for $2.2 million in today’s currency to pay off his many debts. (His original scheme had been to use the sculptures to decorate Broomhall, his rain-sodden ancestral home in Scotland, in which case they might never have been seen again.)
Ever since Lord Byron wrote his excoriating attacks on Elgin’s colonial looting, first in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) and then in The Curse of Minerva (1815), there has been a bitter argument about the legitimacy of the BritishMuseum’s deal. I’ve written a whole book about this controversy and won’t oppress you with all the details, but would just make this one point. If the Mona Lisa had been sawed in two during the Napoleonic Wars and the separated halves had been acquired by different museums in, say, St. Petersburg and Lisbon, would there not be a general wish to see what they might look like if re-united? If you think my analogy is overdrawn, consider this: the body of the goddess Iris is at present in London, while her head is in Athens. The front part of the torso of Poseidon is in London, and the rear part is in Athens. And so on. This is grotesque.
To that essentially aesthetic objection the British establishment has made three replies. The first is, or was, that return of the marbles might set a “precedent” that would empty the world’s museum collections. The second is that more people can see the marbles in London. The third is that the Greeks have nowhere to put or display them. The first is easily disposed of: The Greeks don’t want anything else returned to them and indeed hope to have more, rather than less, Greek sculpture displayed in other countries. And there is in existence no court or authority to which appeals on precedent can be made. (Anyway, who exactly would be making such an appeal? The Aztecs? The Babylonians? The Hittites? Greece’s case is a one-off—quite individual and unique.) As to the second: Melina Mercouri’s husband, the late movie director and screenwriter Jules Dassin, told a British parliamentary committee in 2000 that by the standard of mass viewership the sculptures should all be removed from Athens and London and exhibited in Beijing. After these frivolous and boring objections have been dealt with, we are left with the third and serious one, which is what has brought me back to Athens. Where should the treasures be safeguarded and shown?
It is unfortunately true that the city allowed itself to become very dirty and polluted in the 20th century, and as a result the remaining sculptures and statues on the Parthenon were nastily eroded by “acid rain.” And it’s also true that the museum built on the Acropolis in the 19th century, a trifling place of a mere 1,450 square meters, was pathetically unsuited to the task of housing or displaying the work of Phidias. But gradually and now impressively, the Greeks have been living up to their responsibilities. Beginning in 1992, the endangered marbles were removed from the temple, given careful cleaning with ultraviolet and infra-red lasers, and placed in a climate-controlled interior. Alas, they can never all be repositioned on the Parthenon itself, because, though the atmospheric pollution is now better controlled, Lord Elgin’s goons succeeded in smashing many of the entablatures that held the sculptures in place. That leaves us with the next-best thing, which turns out to be rather better than one had hoped.
About a thousand feet southeast of the temple, the astonishing new AcropolisMuseum will open on June 20. With 10 times the space of the old repository, it will be able to display all the marvels that go with the temples on top of the hill. Most important, it will be able to show, for the first time in centuries, how the Parthenon sculptures looked to the citizens of old.
Arriving excitedly for my preview of the galleries, I was at once able to see what had taken the Greeks so long. As with everywhere else in Athens, if you turn over a spade or unleash a drill you uncover at least one layer of a previous civilization. (Building a metro for the Olympics in 2004 was a protracted if fascinating nightmare for this very reason.) The new museum, built to the design of the French-Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, has had to be mounted above ground on 100 huge reinforced-concrete pillars, which allow you to survey the remnants of villas, drains, bathhouses, and mosaics of the recently unearthed neighborhood below. Much of the ground floor is made of glass so that natural light filters down to these excavations and gives the effect of transparency throughout. But don’t look down for too long. Raise your eyes and you will be given an arresting view of the Parthenon, from a building that has been carefully aligned to share its scale and perspective with the mother ship.
I was impatient to be the first author to see the remounted figures and panels and friezes. Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis, the head of the museum, took me to the top-floor gallery and showed me the concentric arrangement whereby the sculpture of the pediment is nearest the windows, the high-relief metopes are arranged above head height (they are supposed to be seen from below), and finally the frieze is running at eye level along the innermost wall. At any time, you can turn your head to look up and across at the architectural context for which the originals were so passionately carved. At last it will be possible to see the building and its main artifacts in one place and on one day.
The British may continue in their constipated fashion to cling to what they have so crudely amputated, but the other museums and galleries of Europe have seen the artistic point of re-unification and restored to Athens what was looted in the years when Greece was defenseless. Professor Pandermalis proudly showed me an exquisite marble head, of a youth shouldering a tray, that fits beautifully into panel No. 5 of the north frieze. It comes courtesy of the collection of the Vatican. Then there is the sculpted foot of the goddess Artemis, from the frieze that depicts the assembly of Olympian gods, by courtesy of the SalinasMuseum, in Palermo. From Heidelberg comes another foot, this time of a young man playing a lyre, and it fits in nicely with the missing part on panel No. 8. Perhaps these acts of cultural generosity, and tributes to artistic wholeness, could “set a precedent,” too?
The AcropolisMuseum has hit on the happy idea of exhibiting, for as long as following that precedent is too much to hope for, its own original sculptures with the London-held pieces represented by beautifully copied casts. This has two effects: It allows the visitor to follow the frieze round the four walls of a core “cella” and see the sculpted tale unfold (there, you suddenly notice, is the “lowing heifer” from Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn). And it creates a natural thirst to see the actual re-assembly completed. So, far from emptying or weakening a museum, this controversy has instead created another one, which is destined to be among Europe’s finest galleries. And one day, surely, there will be an agreement to do the right thing by the world’s most “right” structure.
We at Global Greek World certainly hope so, Christopher, and thank you for all the support you have given our Global Greek Cause!
To read the original article in Vanity Fair, Click here
To see a slide show of the New Acropolis Museum by the New York Times, Click here
To visit the website of the New Acropolis Museum, Click here
Recently a new initiative for the Repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles has started up, gathering more than 100,000 members on Facebook! To read about this Campaign, headed by Alexis Mantheakis Click here
To buy a copy of Christopher Hitchens' Book "The Elgin Marbles, Should they be Returned to Greece?" Click here
One of our Global Greeks, Greek Cypriot and British entrepreneur Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and known for his easyGroup of Companies, this time last year sent out an open letter to all parties concerned in the debate on the Parthenon Sculptures or Parthenon Marbles, as they are more widely known. The letter was published in many British newspapers calling on the curators of the British Museum and the New Acropolis Museum, to convene and discuss the matter of the repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles.
Refusing to get drawn into the question of legal ownership of the Sculptures, Stelios asked the two parties to engage in a constructive dialogue on the Parthenon Sculptures and their reunification. Stelios’ enterprises have been actively involved in this campaign. EasyGroup has also sponsored a debate which was held by the Cambridge Union Society on the motion of the return of the Parthenon marbles to the New Acropolis Museum. That debate was won by the repatriation supporters.
Stelios, as he likes to be called, headed his open letter as follows:
I JUST WANT THE TWO GUYS TO TALK TO EACH OTHER
Open letter from Stelios, Chairman of easyCruise.com
To: The British Museum, London, UK
The New AcropolisMuseum, Athens, Greece
Re: The Parthenon Marbles
June 2008
Dear Sirs,
I've taken the liberty to write this open letter as someone almost uniquely positioned between the Greek and the British cultures, having spent most of my adult life 'flying' between the two capitals. I think the time has come for the curators of the two museums to have a constructive dialogue about the Parthenon marbles.
Away from politics and name calling, I feel there is now a win-win solution for both museums in the form of a cultural exchange. Therefore, art lovers worldwide might get the once in a lifetime chance to see these masterpieces reunited.
This is why I decided to paint 'Reunite the Parthenon marbles' on the side of our latest cruise ship.
Yours faithfully
Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou
Bravo Stelio!
We don't know if there was any positive response to the letter, but if we judge from the lack of any tangible results and the continuing refusal of the British Museum Trustees to give an inch, as well as their absence from the Official Opening of the New Acropolis Museum on Saturday, well, it speaks for itself! We do however applaud the initiative taken by this very Global Greek and hope that more of us take other such initiatives for the benefit of Hellenism and our Global Greek World!
About Stelios
Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou – who prefers to be known as Stelios, a Serial Entrepreneur - is best known for creating easyJet in 1995, at the age of 28. In 2000, he floated - on the London Stock Exchange - the low-cost airline that revolutionized European air travel. Nowadays, the company has grown into one of Europe’s leading airlines with some 170 aircraft flying over 400 routes between 103 airports in 26 countries. Approximately 45 million people a year fly with easyJet enjoying more value for less!
Stelios is the son of a very successful Greek shipowner, the late Loucas Haji-Ioannou, who provided the seed capital for Stelios’ independent business career, which started when he created a shipping company - Stelmar - at the age of 25. Subsequently, Stelios floated Stelmar on the New York Stock Exchange in 2001; the company was successfully sold to a rival in 2005, creating significant shareholder value.
Today, Stelios remains the biggest single shareholder of easyJet PLC and a non-executive director. In parallel, before the IPO in 2000 - and true to his beliefs in serial entrepreneurship - he consolidated the ownership of the easy brand into his private company, easyGroup, and launched several easy-branded businesses. The group currently includes easyCar (car rental), easyHotel (budget hotels), easyBus (airport transfers), easyOffice (low-cost, serviced office rental for small businesses), easyPizza and easyCruise - all dedicated to offering more value for less to millions of consumers.
In 2006, at the age of 39, Stelios received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for services to entrepreneurship. Since then, Sir Stelios has expanded his dedication to making a difference to society by launching a number of philanthropic initiatives supporting entrepreneurship, higher education and environmental sustainability.
Stelios has pledged 200 scholarships over 10 years to the London School of Economics and Cass Business School in London - his almae mater - supporting young, exceptional scholars who want to make a difference in their chosen fields. Similarly - in partnership with Leonard Cheshire Disability in the UK - Stelios created the "Disabled Entrepreneur of the Year" award given to exceptional entrepreneurs who have overcome significant physical and perceptual limitations in starting their businesses. (www.lcdisability.org/stelios).
In Cyprus, the birthplace of his parents, Stelios co-founded CYMEPA in 1992 (www.cymepa.org) - an association dedicated to preserving the marine environment. In his own birthplace, Greece, he continues his commitment to environmental protection by supporting the Pendeli Reforestation project. Additionally, in Greece, Stelios strives to further inspire entrepreneurship through the Kouros award, a 50,000EU prize given to the outstanding business start-up of the year. Building on his many years of support for the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), Stelios has recently been appointed to the Council of Ambassadors of the WWF-UK.
More likely to be on an aircraft than in an office, Stelios is 42 years old and lives in Monaco.
Photo Source: Alexis Mantheakis 
Since then, Sir Stelios has expanded his dedication to making a difference to society by launching a number of philanthropic initiatives supporting entrepreneurship, higher education and environmental sustainability.
