Photo Gallery New Acropolis Museum
Cranes began hauling over 4,000 pieces of sculpture from the small exhibition hall atop Athens' Acropolis to the new museum 400 meters away at the base of the ancient citadel.
The 130-year-old museum on the Acropolis itself has always been too small for the collection. The move starts here, where the marbles are packed into wood crates filled with Styrofoam and then put in a metal container.
The container is then picked up by one crane, put down, picked up by a lower crane, put down, and then picked up by the final crane.
The last crane drops off the precious cargo right outside the new glass, steel and concrete museum. It is expected to take between six weeks and three months to get all the marbles down.
A large part of the marbles will be from the 160 meter frieze from the Parthenon, the 5th century temple built in honor of Athena, the city's patron goddess. About 80 percent of the frieze survives, depicting animals, humans and gods in a procession honoring Athena.
The new museum was designed by Bernard Tschumi, a US-based architect. Getting all the objects into his new museum will take patience and careful hands. "It will be a very slow, very careful process," Tschumi told the Associated Press. "It's going to be like a...ballet of cranes, or like James Bond."
In case anything goes wrong, the priceless marbles have been insured to the amount of 400 million ($567 million). Here, a worker makes preparations in the new museum. A replica of an ancient Karyatid statue looms in the background.
The third floor of the new museum will be devoted to the Parthenon frieze. Two thirds of the surviving 80 percent is in London's British Museum, after having been taken there late in the 19th century by Lord Elgin.
The Acropolis Museum plans to have replicas of the pieces held in the British Museum included in the display, though with veils on as a sign of protest. Here is a head of a horse from the Parthenon frieze housed in the British Museum.
The ownership of the pieces has long been a contested issue. Museums the world over include pieces with contested ownership, and the issue is hotly debated in both political and curatorial circles. Here is a larger portion of the frieze, also on display at the British Museum.
