ACROPOLIS MUSEUM, History

Hi, my name’s Jill, and I’m your personal guide. Along with MyWoWo, I’d like to welcome you to one of the Wonders of the World: the Acropolis Museum.

This modern building houses the statues and other artifacts discovered on and around the Acropolis of Athens. It replaces the older museum, built in 1874, which was next to the Parthenon. The digs carried out after its foundation brought to light numerous new finds, and the original museum soon became too small to display such a vast number of exceptional masterpieces. 

The idea of building a new museum dates to 1976; it took 33 long years and numerous designs to complete the museum you can visit today. When a location had finally been decided upon, the excavation work for the foundations revealed new remains of Christian Athens, so the construction work had to take these new discoveries on board and display them.

The actual construction work did not begin until 2007, and the museum was inaugurated in summer 2009, thanks to the innovative project of the Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, in collaboration with his Greek colleague, Michalis Photiadis....