The Old Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece: An Overdue Necrology

Since its well-publicized inauguration in 2009, the New Acropolis Museum has received mixed reviews by scholars and critics. This paper is a response to the lack of attention to the dismantling of the permanent exhibition of the Old Acropolis Museum, an important museological artifact of postwar Greece. It delineates a biography of this museum, focusing on its various reincarnations since 1874 and, most importantly, on the installation by archaeologist Giannes Meliades (1895–1975) from 1954 to 1964. Meliades, Ephor of the Acropolis from 1941 to 1961, held that his installation was in-and-of-itself a work of art of its own times, rich in aesthetic claims and epistemological implications. It is therefore imperative to remember and analyze Meliades’s artifact, even as we inquire into what precisely was lost when the Old Acropolis Museum was dismantled. This analysis is premised on the notion that a museum is a relational nexus, whose dismantling may have wider implications for viewers, visitors, scholars, and artifacts.