LegendThe Caryatids
When Elgin's men carried off the sixth maiden, the five who were left were heard at night, crying for their sister.
Source: A story told in Athens since the early nineteenth century and recorded by travellers
The story
The temples on the Acropolis are shells. Their sculpture was taken down long ago, some by collectors and some, later, to save it from the air of Athens. This museum, three hundred metres from the rock, is where it went.
It opened in 2009. It was built to show the sculptures in the light they were made for, and to answer an old objection: that Greece had nowhere fit to keep the pieces now in the British Museum.
Close by, with a page of its own: Acropolis of Athens.
What is here
One museum ticket covers everything in the building, including the dig underneath. The Acropolis itself, three hundred metres away, is a separate place with a separate ticket.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The excavation under the building | Included |
| Ground floor: the glass ramp | Included |
| First floor: the early temples and the maidens | Included; photographs may be restricted |
| First floor: the Caryatids | Included |
| Second floor: restaurant and terrace | Open to ticket holders; ask at the desk about a pass for the restaurant alone |
| Third floor: the Parthenon Gallery | Included |
| The Acropolis and the Parthenon | Separate site, separate ticket; it has its own page |
If you have one minute
On the top floor, by the glass
This room is exactly as long and as wide as the inner building of the Parthenon, and it is turned to face the same way. Look out through the glass and you see the temple itself on the hill.
Round the core of the room runs the frieze, a band of carving 160 metres long that shows a procession for the goddess Athena. The honey-coloured blocks are the originals that stayed in Athens. The white ones are plaster copies. Their originals are in London.
One floor down stand five of the six maidens who held up the porch of the Erechtheion. A place is kept empty for the sixth.
Before you go in at all, look down. The building stands on pillars over the streets and houses of an ancient neighbourhood of Athens.
Things people often get wrong
"The Acropolis ticket gets you in." It does not. The museum is a separate body with its own ticket, and there is no official ticket for both.
"The statues on the hill are the real ones." The maidens on the Erechtheion are casts, and so are the carved panels left on the Parthenon. The originals are here or abroad.
"Greek statues were white." They were painted. On several statues here you can still see red, blue and green.
"Lord Elgin took everything." He took about half of what was left of the Parthenon's sculpture, between 1801 and 1805. Most of the rest is in this building.
People who stood here
- Lord Byron (English Romantic poet)He lived in Athens in 1810 and 1811, lodging in a monastery a few minutes' walk from here. He saw the gaps Elgin's men had left on the temples and wrote a furious poem in which the goddess Athena curses Elgin. He may have crossed this very ground on his way up to the rock. Greeks still quote him.
- Pericles (the statesman who led Athens at its height)He proposed the building of the Parthenon in 447 BC and defended its cost before the assembly. The sculptures upstairs were carved under his eye. The streets under your feet led to the theatre next door, where he sat in the front row. He may have walked here.
Go deeper: ten stops, from the dig under the door to the top floor
The museum is arranged like the climb up the hill: slopes first, then the early temples, then the Parthenon at the top.
1. Outside: a building on stilts
When the ground was cleared for the museum, the diggers found an Athenian neighbourhood that had been lived in for more than a thousand years, from classical times to the Middle Ages. There were houses, workshops, baths and drains.
The architects, Bernard Tschumi and Michael Photiadis, lifted the building on about a hundred concrete columns, each placed where it would do least harm. You walk in over glass and see the dig below. Since 2019 you can also walk down into it.
2. The glass ramp: what the slopes held
The first gallery is a wide ramp that rises like the path up the rock. In the cases are offerings from the small sanctuaries on the slopes, and pots from ordinary houses.
Look for the wedding vases. Brides of Athens dedicated them to a nymph at a shrine just below the rock.
3. Lions and monsters: the temples before the Parthenon
At the top of the ramp you meet a lioness tearing a calf. It filled the gable of a temple built on the rock about 570 BC, more than a century before the Parthenon. It is carved in soft limestone and was brightly painted.
Near it is a creature with three human bodies and one snake's tail, each body holding a different thing. Traces of blue on the beards gave it its nickname, Bluebeard.
4. The maidens, and the day the Persians came
The hall of columns is filled with statues of young women, each a gift to Athena from a rich family. They stood in the open on the rock. They smile slightly, and each held out an offering in one hand.
In 480 BC a Persian army took Athens and smashed and burned everything on the Acropolis. When the Athenians came home they did not throw the broken statues away. They buried them on the rock, as holy things.
They lay in the ground for more than 2,300 years. Diggers found them in the 1860s and 1880s, with the paint still fresh in places. The earth had saved the colour.
The man carrying a calf on his shoulders is one of the oldest, about 570 BC. His name, Rhombos, is cut on the base.
5. The Kritios Boy: a statue shifts its weight
This small figure, made about 480 BC, changed sculpture. Older statues stand square, with the weight on both feet. This boy rests on his left leg. His right knee bends, his hips tilt, and his head turns a little.
It is the first statue we know that stands the way a living person stands. Every relaxed figure in Western art after it, down to Michelangelo's David, uses the same pose.
6. The Caryatids: five and a gap
These five held up the south porch of the Erechtheion for 2,400 years. They were brought indoors in 1979 because acid rain was eating them. Walk round behind. Their thick plaits of hair are carved in full and are there to strengthen the neck, the thinnest part of the support.
The sixth was taken by Elgin's men in 1803 and is in the British Museum. Between 2011 and 2014 the five were cleaned here, in front of visitors, with lasers.
7. Nike ties her sandal
This relief comes from the low wall round the small temple of Athena Nike, about 410 BC. The goddess of victory stoops to fix her sandal. The thin cloth clings to her body as if wet. Sculptors call this the wet style, and Roman and later artists copied it for centuries.
Nearby is a small relief of Athena leaning on her spear with her head bowed. Nobody knows what she is looking at. It is called the Mourning Athena.
8. The top floor: the Parthenon Gallery
The glass box on the roof is twisted 23 degrees from the floors below so that it lines up with the temple. The sculptures hang in the order and on the sides where they were on the building, and in daylight from the same direction.
There were three kinds of sculpture. In the gables stood huge figures telling the birth of Athena and her contest with the sea god for the city. Under the roof outside ran 92 square panels of fights: gods against giants, Greeks against Amazons and centaurs. Inside the colonnade ran the frieze.
Walk the frieze from the south-west corner, as the procession does. Horsemen gather speed, chariots follow, then men with jars and animals for sacrifice, and at the east end the gods sit waiting.
9. The white casts: the argument with London
Of the frieze that survives, about 50 metres are here and about 80 metres are in the British Museum. Some figures are split, with a head in one city and a body in the other.
Elgin was British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which then ruled Greece. He said he had the sultan's leave. Greece says a foreign ruler could not give away what was not his. The British Museum says it acquired the sculptures legally and shows them to the world for free.
Other holders have given pieces back. A fragment came from Palermo in 2022, and three from the Vatican in 2023. Talks between Athens and the British Museum have been reported since 2022. When we checked, no agreement had been announced.
Chinese visitors know this kind of argument from the bronze animal heads taken from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860. Several have come home since 2000, by purchase or gift.
10. Paint, and the same years in China
One case shows the minerals that made the colours: red and yellow earths, green malachite, blue made from copper and sand. Greeks thought an unpainted statue unfinished.
The same is true of the Terracotta Army near Xi'an, made about 210 BC. Its soldiers were painted in bright colours that faded within minutes of meeting the air.
When the Persians burned the Acropolis in 480 BC, Confucius had one year left to live. When the Parthenon was finished in 432 BC, China was entering the age of the Warring States (475–221 BC).