The Acropolis Museum is a sleek, bright, modern venue for displaying the artifacts that have been recovered from the Parthenon and other ancient  buildings on the Acropolis.  The museum is directly opposite the Acropolis.  The glass floor in the entryway revealed that the museum had been erected over an excavation of streets inhabited from pre-Classical through Roman and Byzantine times. 

          There were glass walls as well, admitting sunlight to illuminate long galleries of reconstructed statues and temple friezes.  Most of the panels in high and low relief, as well as figures in the round, were plaster replicas based on drawings.  Many of those drawings were made by Jacques Carrey,  an 18th Century French artist.  Some of the Parthenon’s sculptures are known only from Carrey’s detailed depictions of them, over 500 in all. 

          In some cases, the museum’s restorers could embed actual fragments into figural reconstructions.  Sadly, exposure to 2,500 years of weather, wars, and plunder has resulted in Greece’s loss of many of her invaluable antiquities. Colonial Empires used to fund archaeological expeditions in order to discover ancient treasures and seize them. These regimes derived cultural prestige from association with Athens’ Golden Age. 

          In the early 1800’s, Lord Elgin oversaw the removal of sections of the Parthenon’s friezes.  It was a particularly egregious and destructive theft.  The British Museum has yet to return the spoils to Greece.  The Acropolis Museum would be an ideal place to display them, in my opinion, a point of view that I should guess is shared by most Greeks alive today.

   
I did my best to photograph this holographic image of the statue of Athena in the Parthenon.  It was 13 meters tall, and was overlaid with ivory and gold.  It disappeared before 1,000 CE, and accounts of its fate differ.

The Acropolis dominated the view from the museum.

Several of the original caryatids from the Erechtheion have been preserved.  Those of the Porch of the Maidens on the Acropolis are replicas.

The same ticket admits visitors to the Acropolis Museum and to the excavations below it.

I saw this small triple statue of Cybele in a case near the excavations.  Cybele was a goddess of the night whose devotees also worshipped Athena.