Bettany Hughes tells Art Quarterly about her behind-the-scenes preview of Athens’s newest museum, due to open early next year.

Wherever you are in Athens, the Acropolis always seems to be there in the background, like an image in a photograph that has been double-exposed. As well as being geologically ancient, it has a historical pedigree many thousands of years old. We know that it was occupied around 1500–1250 BC, the heroic era of the Trojan Wars described in the Iliad. At that time, it was a big civic and religious centre, and you can still see some of the Bronze Age walls there.

In 480 BC the Persians launched an attack against Athens. The Athenians beat them at the Battle of Salamis, and that victory brought about a profound change in the city’s psyche. After defeating the super-power of the time, this small city-state realised it could do anything it wanted. This was the beginning of Athens’s Golden Age, and the start of the great Periclean building programme on the Acropolis.

Most people know that the Parthenon is a temple, but not everyone realises that the whole Acropolis was sacred. The Athenians saw it as a stairway to the gods, and put up buildings to house deities in an attempt to build heaven on earth. Perhaps that’s why the buildings have such extraordinary brio. Although priests and priestesses resided on the Acropolis itself, by this time most Athenians lived in the city that spread out below the rock. The Acropolis was really a cult centre, but religion meant something very different in the ancient world. It was a natural part of everyday life, and the Acropolis was a vivid, visceral place.

The restoration going on there now is truly exciting. I was lucky because when I was there last year I saw the craftsmen and archaeologists at work rebuilding the columns. They are not going to restore the site completely – it won’t be like Knossos – they are just restoring a certain amount of the stonework. The latest high-tech computer imaging is being combined with very traditional skills practised by stonemasons, who are the only people who can work the material. If you go there and hear them chipping away, you are instantly taken back to the 5th century BC, as that’s exactly how it would have sounded when the Parthenon was being built. While at work, the masons found fish bones on top of one of the columns – the remains of a picnic lunch enjoyed by one of the original workers. This immediate link to the past underlines the fact that although we might think of the Acropolis as solid and immovable, it’s actually a very dynamic, evolving place.

There’s no statuary left on the Acropolis itself, apart from some decoration on the monuments. Most of it has gone into the collections of the Acropolis Museum or the National Archaeological Museum, and over the years much has been looted or burned. The old museum was housed on the Acropolis itself, but that building is now closed and it is unclear what it will be used for in future. It’s a good thing that the new museum is not on the site itself, as previously people tended to just mill around it; having the museum in a different location will make visitors really focus on the sculptures.

The new museum is well placed, right next to the new metro. I think it is best to look at all the sculptures there first, before continuing on to the Acropolis, so you can transport them mentally and imagine them in situ when you look at the buildings. There are very pleasant landscapes and marble walkways between the two sites, and you can either walk up to the rock through the Theatre of Dionysius or walk round and enter the Acropolis through the ceremonial entrance.

Designed by Bernard Tschumi, the new museum building is extraordinarily ugly on the outside. It is clad in smoked glass, and from the distance looks like a car showroom. But this is completely redeemed by the interior design, which is absolutely beautiful and makes full use of natural light. In many places there are glass floors so you can see the excavations below. Often you’re walking above excavations 40 feet below, so you really get the sense of how deep the city is. In fact, you’re looking down on Roman or Hellenistic remains rather than ones from the 5th century BC. It’s a very exciting and sympathetic way of showing the layers of the capital.

The opening of the museum has been delayed. It was originally scheduled for 2004, but construction only started at the end of that year, and now it will officially open early next year. In the meantime, the ground floor is open to the public for two hours each day. Perhaps the extensive nature of the excavations took longer than anticipated, but having talked to the Director, who is committed to making it all as perfect as possible, I can imagine him thinking: ‘This is going to last for all time, so what is the point of rushing it through in order to make some press deadline?’ Everyone there is genuinely concerned to get it absolutely right and not to compromise on anything.

You enter the museum via a ramp, which pays homage to the one leading up to the Acropolis. Once you are inside, the first thing you see is the pediment that would have been on the front of the 6th-century BC Archaic temple (the Hecatompedon) that the Parthenon replaced. The sculptural style of this period was very vigorous. There’s also a giant statue of a lion, which was being hauled into place when I visited this autumn. For me, the Pre-Classical sculptures are among the great revelations of the collection. The Persians burnt the Acropolis when they sacked Athens in 480 BC, and you can still see scorch marks on some of the statues. There is something poignant about the fact that a few also still bear traces of their original paint. Above them is a viewing platform, so you can get an aerial view of them. One doesn’t normally see sculptures from above, and it’s a strange and wonderful experience. When I visited, the final arrangement hadn’t yet been made, and it was almost as though the statues were waiting around in a state of suspended animation. One of the great features of the museum in general is that sculptures are presented in the round and in natural light, which is how they would have been seen originally.

In preparation for the opening, the staff are doing a lot of conservation work on the statues, and I saw a young Greek archaeologist – a dead ringer for Lara Croft – using a huge power drill to take out the old corroded rods that had been inserted in the 19th century to hold the statues together. The building won’t just contain statues from the old museum, as new pieces from the archaeological museum will be added to the displays.

The most famous items are displayed one floor up, and this is where the Parthenon frieze has been reassembled. The authentic pieces of the frieze are interspersed with plaster casts of sections that are in other collections, and a deliberate distinction is made between them, with the plaster casts standing out as pristine white and the original parts left emphatically unscrubbed. As I entered, I noticed pieces of newspaper still attached to the back of one of the casts, almost as though a point were being made about it being replica, but whether or not this will be kept prominent remains to be seen. The Director of the museum is diplomatic on the restitution question, preferring to talk about the spiritual connection he feels with the artists who created these extraordinary works rather than who should own them. However, my eye was caught by a nymph who figures in a frieze showing the battle between Poseidon and Athena for the Acropolis. Her head (which is in the British Museum) has been replaced by a plaster cast, which looks wistfully out of a window facing towards the west, and you can’t help but feel that she is looking towards her original version in London.

The 2004 Olympics were a shot in the arm for Athens, and the new museum reflects the fact that the city is enjoying a second Golden Age, harking back to the first one, when the Classical sculptures on display were produced and the Acropolis was in its heyday.

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