World News: Marble fragment of Parthenon back in Greece – Gulf Digital News

  • Date: 11-Jan-2022
  • Source: Gulf Digital News
  • Sector:Technology
  • Country:Gulf
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World News: Marble fragment of Parthenon back in Greece – Gulf Digital News





ATHENS: A marble fragment of the Parthenon temple has been returned to Athens from a museum in Sicily, a move officials hope will advance efforts to have the British Museum send back ancient sculptures from Greece’s most renowned ancient landmark.

Athens’ Acropolis Museum presented yesterday the “Fagan fragment”, a 35-by-31-centimetre (12-by-14-inch) marble fragment showing the foot of the seated ancient Greek goddess Artemis brought home from the Antonio Salinas Archaeological Museum in Palermo.

“It is marvellous that Sicilian and Italian friends thought to bring it back where it was born,” Acropolis Museum Director Nikolaos Stampolidis said of the fragment, once part of the temple’s eastern frieze.

It is to be placed in the Parthenon Gallery – a glass-walled chamber with a view of the Parthenon that displays sculptures of the temple’s 160-metre-long frieze in the same position as they were on the original monument, with plaster copies replacing pieces that are now mainly in the British Museum.

The “Fagan fragment” is a part of a larger sculpture in the Acropolis Museum that is mostly a plaster copy, whose original pieces are in the British Museum.