Look who we found in line for the museum! The Acropolis Museum is super awesome. It’s built on top of an archeological site, and many of the floors are glass so you can see the excavated ruins below your feet. It has a lovely restaurant with these lovely people. Our view while we ate lunch. Isabel geeking out giving us a tour of the highlights of the museum. This top floor is oriented the same as the Parthenon, and is the same dimensions (the steel columns indicate the positions of the outer columns of the temple). It houses the panels of the frieze and “metopes” that originally were mounted high up all around the temple. In a very sad display of current politics, only a small number are originals. The rest are casts of the originals which were looted during ottoman rule (mostly by the British) and never returned. There is a spot in the display for every panel, with the original when available, a cast when the original is elsewhere, and an empty space where the original is lost or not yet found. “Marble columns. Like this one. And that one. And this one.” Sophie with (a cast of) a statue of Artemis originally on a pediment. Isabel with (a cast of) a statue of Demeter. The really beautiful and interesting “florette” design that originally topped the Parthenon. Like almost everything here it was destroyed by war and looters in the 19th century so only a few small pieces are in the museum collection (the dark pieces). Two of the original Caryatids. You can’t see it well here but their gowns resemble column grooves around their legs and the fruit baskets they carry on their heads resemble Doric column capitals. Isabel with The Pensive Athena, one of her favorite pieces in the museum and a very famous image. Detail of The Pensive Athena. It may have been placed in a location that honored Athens’ war dead.
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