Nikolaos Chr. Stampolidis, General Director of the Acropolis Museum of Athens. Photo © Courtesy of the museum
1.What is your museum about and what is your work there?
The Acropolis Museum is a thematic museum, not only of one archaeological site, like the Acropolis, the Rock and its slopes, but a museum representing the culmination of Greek civilization and the elegance and beauty of the classical period. The Museum presents artworks and exhibit-monuments that incorporate and reflect great universal ideas and meanings, such as democracy and world values. Becoming a center and meeting place for classical culture and education for future generations, both in Greece and abroad, is one of our key strategic goals.
Naturally, the ultimate objective of the Acropolis Museum is the reunification of the Parthenon sculptures. A great start has been made with the recent return of ten fragments of the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, but also of the renowned ‘Fagan fragment’ from the A. Salinas Museum in Palermo, for at least eight years.
The significance of the return from Palermo does not lie in the long-term nature of the deposit of the fragment to the monument to which it belongs, the Parthenon frieze at the Acropolis Museum, but in the prospect of remaining here permanently, as declared by the Italian authorities.
