Greece to open Athens museum

Athens: Greece officially opens its New Acropolis Museum today after years of delays, rekindling its campaign to have the British Museum return its collection of fifth-century BC artworks taken from the Parthenon temple.

President Karolos Papoulias, Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis and European Commission President Jose Barroso will speak at the opening, details of which continue to be a closely guarded secret.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is attending. The ceremony, costing less than half the six million euros (Dh30.7 million) originally budgeted, will be broadcast live on Greek TV and online.

"Everything is ready," Dimitris Pandermalis, the professor of archaeology who has overseen the project, said.

"The ceremony will be plain and elegant, not spectacular. We're leaving spectacular to the museum and its exhibits."

The $181 million museum is Greece's answer to the British argument that there's nowhere in Greece to house the Elgin Marbles, the sculptures taken from the Parthenon's frieze to Britain 200 years ago. The frieze depicts gods, giants, Greeks and centaurs in the annual Panathenaic procession.

At the opening, characters from the frieze will come to life and be projected across the night sky.

Architect Bernard Tschumi's concrete-and-glass structure will have the stones Greece still has as the centrepiece, in a glass gallery that's swivelled at an angle to the rest of the building, complementing the angle of the Parthenon temple on the top of the hill 300 metres above it.

White plaster replicas of the stones in the British Museum will sit next to the sand-coloured stones that were left behind.

Successive UK governments have said the marbles won't be returned.

British Museum director Neil MacGregor, in a 2007 interview, said objects could in theory be loaned for three or six months, though this would be impossible.

However, the Greek government refused to acknowledge the museum as the legal owner. Samaras said this month that would be unacceptable to any Greek government.

The opening is also slotting in to Greece's 'A masterpiece you can afford' tourism campaign, designed to entice visitors amid the global crisis. Greece is expecting 2.5 million visitors to the museum annually.

Admission has been set at one euro, the price of a bus ticket. To drive the point home, Athens buses and trains on the subway have been decorated with scenes of the frieze for the past week.

The ticket price will increase to five euros next year "when some global recovery is in sight," Samaras said last month.

The number of paying visitors to the Acropolis fell seven per cent last year to just over one million people, according to figures from the country's statistics office.