AIN’T NOTHING LIKE THE REAL THING

What does it mean that when one performs an online search for “Parthenon,” the first links and images are of its replica in Nashville, Tennessee? This historically accurate building was built as temporary structure for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in 1897, fortified with more permanent finishes in 1925, and rechristened as a city art museum in 1931.

It makes perfect sense that someone would want to rebuild the Parthenon, as the original structure has suffered centuries of war damage and pillaging. And it makes perfect sense that Americans would want to rebuild the Parthenon on their own soil. It’s as a folly, spectacle, a circus act. It’s an act of possession, claiming a cultural history not available to us in the New World. And it’s an act of resistance, a refusal of time, loss and decay.

August 16, 2018 by Nalina Moses

GREEK TRAGEDY

The Acropolis Museum, completed in 2012 by Bernard Tschumi Architects, is a substantial piece of architecture and a substantial piece of work. Tschumi, whose best-known projects have a cerebral anti-sensual bent, was an unlikely candidate to design a home for the archaeological artifacts, including the Parthenon sculptures, culled from this iconic religious site. But he has crafted a building that suits needs exquisitely.

The museum, with a glass skin, concrete floors and round metal-clad columns, is a quiet elegant shell that gives itself over to the objects inside. Its foundations pierce ancient excavations, which are visible through glass floors at ground level. Its column grid aligns with street level on lower floors, and then shifts on the fourth and highest floor, where the Parthenon marbles are housed, to the grid of that building itself, which is visible beyond. The columns here are spaced exactly as those of the ancient structure. What parts the museum possesses of the original metopes, friezes and pediments are displayed in their original configuration, only lowered so that they can be viewed more easily. Missing panels and figures – lost, destroyed, or looted – are replaced with white plaster casts of the originals, which are conspicuously bright and blemishless, or simply left blank.

It’s thrilling to walk through the fourth floor, measuring one’s steps against the rhythm of the columns, and understanding the stories and visual accents in the sculptures, which are designed to be appraised together, like this, and not as single pieces on pedestals. When one reaches the low triangular pediments at each end of the floor, another story begins. They are illegible, as only about 5% of the original marbles are present, with all the missing spots left empty. The majority of the Parthenon sculptures, about 60%, remain housed at the British Museum. For decades that Museum argued that the pieces, claimed by Lord Elgin in the nineteenth century, were being held for safekeeping. Now that argument no longer holds.

The Acropolis Museum makes clear that the marbles belong here. And it makes the argument, a political one, simply and convincingly.

Photograph copyright Christian Richters, Peter Mauss/Esto .

August 15, 2018 by Nalina Moses

THE GREEK WAY

The Parthenon is the world’s most iconic building, so it’s sad to see its current condition. Its stonework has suffered from centuries of war, weather, pillaging, and neglect; it’s a relic. What one sees of the current restoration work doesn’t inspire much confidence.

The temple’s front facade is embedded in a web of fine steel scaffolding, as if undergoing acupuncture. At the inner sanctum, where the gilded statue of Athena once presided, there is a construction crane whose massive boom could topple the remaining structure with one false move. Workmen, without boots or hardhats, crawl over the podium like ants. Behind the building loose masonry pieces, unmarked and presumably uncatalogued, lie in open piles. The grounds are unpaved and uregulated; there are no walkways and signage, with only thin cords to hold back visitors from construction zones.

When visiting Olympia, an ancient site with similar conditions, a visitor asked our guide, a native Athenian, why the Greeks didn’t rebuild the Temple of Zeus there, where only one original column stands but scores of stone blocks lay scattered around it. Our guide swept her hand over the scene and explained, “You don’t understand the Greeks; we’re OK with all of this.”

But at other sites in the country there has been strong, sensible reconstruction and preservation work. At Delphi there are paved paths and steps, wayfinding signage, and explanatory texts. The buildings have been discretely fortified; no rubble remains. And the new Acropolis Museum, a state-of-the-art facility, just below the ancient site, was built while preserving the archaeological ruins below its foundations. Now the Parthenon’s marbles have a fine home, while the building itself seems especially vulnerable.

August 14, 2018 by Nalina Moses

A very fashionable friend of mine was vacationing in Greece last month, and crafted a special laurel-leaf headdress from gold foil to wear when he visited the Acropolis. He looked godly in it, so much so that the security guards at the Parthenon asked him to take it off to honor the sacred nature of the site. Another thing the authorities might want to do, if they’re so concerned, is to protect the building properly while it’s being restored.

My friend’s photos captured the timeless appeal of the Acropolis buildings, showing piles of bleached stone against a dazzling blue sky, on a cliff high above the city. They also showed how vulnerable the Parthenon, the site’s chief attraction, is. Right now there are two construction cranes inside it, a web of steel scaffolding running through it, and, all around it, in post-apocalyptic disarray, piles of rubble and cut stone, scraps of ornamental sculpture, and three melon-sized canon balls from what looks like a nineteenth-century military attack. All these things are lying around unmarked, untagged, and uncovered, giving the place the feeling of a sunny junkyard. I remember a devastating piece 60 Minutes aired six months before the Athens Summer Olympics in 2004, which showed sheep grazing in the field where the new stadium would be. A spokesman for the Greeks explained cheerfully that this was “the Greek way,” to work without too much anxiety and bring everything together at the end. I hope there’s a similar magic guiding this project.

Photo by Robert Quadrini

October 03, 2012 by Nalina Moses