Set on the southern slope of the Acropolis on Dionysiou Areopagitou Street in central Athens, the Acropolis Museum is the principal modern presentation of the sculpture and architectural remains of the great hilltop sanctuary above. The current building was inaugurated on 20 June 2009 to designs by the Swiss-French architect Bernard Tschumi and replaced the earlier small museum on the summit of the rock that had served the same function since the late nineteenth century. The need for a new museum had been recognised since the 1970s, when the original small Acropolis Museum on the hilltop reached the limits of its capacity. A series of architectural competitions during the 1980s and 1990s produced increasingly ambitious designs, with the final commission going to Bernard Tschumi and his local Greek collaborator Michalis Photiadis in 2001. Construction began in 2003 and was complicated by the discovery of substantial Roman, Byzantine and early Christian archaeological remains under the proposed building footprint. The final design integrates the various archaeological discoveries directly into the museum building. The principal entrance is supported on a series of concrete columns that rise around the surviving foundations of the Roman and Byzantine settlement, with sections of the original streets visible directly underfoot through extensive glass floors and walkways. The arrangement provides one of the most visible integrations of new museum architecture and the underlying archaeology of any major recent European cultural building. The principal upper level of the museum is the famous Parthenon Gallery, a rectangular concrete and steel hall oriented exactly along the principal axis of the Parthenon temple visible through the windows above. The surviving sculptures from the Parthenon, including the metopes, the pediment figures and the famous Panathenaic Procession frieze, are displayed in their original spatial arrangement around the perimeter of the gallery, providing for the first time since antiquity a coherent reconstruction of the original sculptural programme. Plaster casts of the various Parthenon sculptures currently held abroad, particularly the substantial collection of original marble fragments held at the British Museum since 1816 known as the Elgin Marbles, fill the gaps in the original sequence and provide a visual argument for the eventual reunification of the original sculptural ensemble. The museum continues to lobby for the return of the marbles, and the design of the Parthenon Gallery was deliberately conceived to provide a permanent display location for the originals should they eventually be returned to Athens.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: Dionysiou Areopagitou 15, Athens, Greece

Website: https://www.theacropolismuseum.gr

Opening Date: 20/06/2009