When it comes to taking pictures I like doors, statues, balconies and washing lines, Kim on the other hand likes people pictures so I thought I might share a few of them with you.
This one was taken in the Polish City of Wroclaw, a party of nuns visiting the Cathedral…
Posted in Cathedrals, Europe, History, Hotels, Literature, Poland, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Achilleion Corfu, Berlin, Breslau, Corfu, George Clooney, German Kaisers, Hohenzollern, Potsdam, Poznan, Prussian Kings, The Monuments Men, Wroclaw, Wroclaw Historical Museum
Outside the museum and also in the cavernous entrance hall there are glass floors with sub-level views of the excavations that were discovered during the construction of the building and contributed to the delays and then there is a steady incline through a timeline of seven centuries of history and impressive well set out displays along a generously wide gallery that provides sufficient space for everyone to stop and enjoy the exhibits without feeling hurried or under pressure to rush.
‘Dull is the eye that will not weep to see Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed By British hands, which it had best behoved To guard those relics ne’er to be restored. Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved, And once again thy hapless bosom gored, And snatch’d thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!‘ Lord Byron
The Elgin Marbles debate/controversy reared its ugly head again when it was reported that the British Museum is going to loan a piece to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in Russia. Howls of anguish and cries of foul have broken out in Athens who say this action is the equivalent of poking the Greeks in the eye with a very sharp stick!
In 1817 the British Museum took possession of the Elgin Marbles but the Greeks have built a museum especially for them. Unlike any other museum in the world the Acropolis Museum in Athens is one has been designed to exhibit something it does not own and cannot yet exhibit but hopes that it will be the catalyst for the permanent return of the disputed artefacts. The top floor is designed to provide a full 360º panoramic of the building and how the sculptures would have looked when they were originally commissioned and sculptured in the fifth century BC.
The gloves are off and the battle is now on between the new state-of-the-art Acropolis Museum and the more traditional British Museum for the right to exhibit them.
The Museum was originally planned to be completed in 2004 to accompany the return of the Olympic Games to their spiritual Athenian home but construction setbacks and various outbreaks of controversy along the way have meant that it did not finally open to the expectant public until June 2009.
After four years of visiting Athens on the way to the Greek islands I finally managed to see the new Acropolis Museum in September 2009. I purchased tickets on line a week or so before for just €1 (prices rose to €5 in 2010, so it was a bargain) and arrived at my allotted time of ten o’clock. I had feared that the place would be crowded and uncomfortable but this was not the case at all and without the lines of visitors that I had anticipated it was easy to cruise effortlessly past the ticket desks and into the museum.
I had a gigantic sense of anticipation because I have visited the old inadequate museum at the top of the Acropolis a couple of times before in 2000 and 2006 and I have been genuinely looking forward to seeing this magnificent replacement. I have to say that anticipation was mixed with trepidation because having followed the saga of the open wound debate about the Elgin Marbles (or the Parthenon Sculptures, depending on your point of view) I genuinely wondered how I was going to feel.
The British Museum argues that London is a better place to make them available to the public because with 6.7 million visitors in 2013 it is the second most visited museum in the World after the Louvre in Paris. This is a powerful argument and one they can probably rely on for many years to come because in the same year the Acropolis Museum attracted only 1.4 million visitors which puts it way down the most visited list at about sixtieth.
Outside the museum and also in the cavernous entrance hall there are glass floors with sub-level views of the excavations that were discovered during the construction of the building and contributed to the delays and then there is a steady incline through a timeline of seven centuries of ancient history and impressive well set out displays along a generously wide gallery that provides sufficient space for everyone to stop and enjoy the exhibits without feeling hurried or under pressure to rush.
Moving on to the second floor there are two galleries that I have to say I did not find so well set out and involved a rambling walk through a succession of exhibits that was not helped by the absence of a simple floor plan to help guide the visitor through and having finished with the second floor I then had to double back to get to the third and the Parthenon Gallery having skilfully avoided the café terrace and the inevitable shop on the way.
After an hour passing through centuries of ancient Greece I finally arrived at the top floor Gallery, which is designed to eventually hold and display all of the Parthenon sculptures (or the Elgin Marbles, depending on your point of view) but for the time being has only about half of the originals and the rest are plaster casts made from the remaining treasures currently remaining in London.
It is truly impressive and with the Acropolis Hill and the Parthenon looming up dramatically outside I can only explain it rather inadequately as a very memorable experience.
Today, not only the Greek Government but most of the Greek people as well would rather like the sculptures back but have consistently turned down a British Museum offer to give the Marbles to the Acropolis Museum on a loan basis for just three months on a similar basis as the arrangement with the Hermitage.
The Culture Minister explained that: “The Government, as any other Greek Government would have done in its place, is obliged to turn down the offer. This is because accepting it would legalise the snatching of the Marbles and the monument’s carving-up two hundred years ago.”
After due consideration I am inclined to agree with this and believe that the place for the sculptures are in Athens and not London but this is a very complex debate for archaeological scholars to resolve that cannot be rushed for the sake of wounded national pride and a few more years sorting it out is hardly going to matter.
Quiz Time:
Similar Elgin Marbles disputes over ownership of museum exhibits…
In each case, What are they, Where are they and Who wants them back?
Have a go, it’s just a bit of armless fun!
Posted in Athens, Europe, Greece, History, Literature, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Acropolis, Archaeology, British Museum, Byron, Elgin Marbles, George Clooney, Greece, Parthenon, The Monuments Men
And so we turned our backs on the Anonymous Pedestrians and made our way back towards the centre, crossed the old city moat and turned left towards the Historical Museum of Wroclaw.
Our plans so far had worked out just perfectly, yesterday when the sun had shined we had stayed outside for our sightseeing and today which was overcast and chilly we were going to spend inside and undercover.
We only had time for one museum today and I knew that Kim certainly wouldn’t have the patience for two so we choose the Historical Museum rather than the National Museum and the Panorama of the Battle of Raclawice for two good reasons. Firstly neither of us really gets a big thrill from looking at paintings and sculptures and secondly because today on a Sunday the Historical Museum had free admission and the National Museum did not. No need for a debate, No contest!
The Museum is housed in a former Palace of the Hohenzollern Prussian Royal Family and has been restored to something of its former grandeur since being mostly destroyed in the fighting of 1945. The Prussian Kings and the German Emperors rather liked Breslau (Wroclaw), spent some considerable time there and had monuments of themselves erected in prominent places to record the fact like these two of Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II:
By the time the monarchy was abolished in 1918, including this one, the German Kaiser had quite a few royal palaces to choose from. In Berlin he had the City Palace which was badly damaged by Allied bombing and despite the protests of West Germany demolished by the German Democratic Republic in 1950. In the city of Posen (now Polish Poznań) he had the Imperial Castle, which during World-War-Two became Hitler’s residence in Poland and in Potsdam he had the New Palace which was looted and badly damaged by Russian troops in the Red Army invasion.
Germany and Russia were always pinching each others treasure and all this thieving was a two way thing and among the Red Army troops who entered Berlin in 1945 were experts sent to establish “trophy commissions.” Their official mission was to look for Russian cultural property stolen by the Nazis when they had invaded the Soviet Union a few years earlier but Red Army officers started removing the large art collections and treasures that had been stored in bunkers and railway depots during the war and transported them home presumably in retaliation for the looting places like the Grand Palace at Peterhof in St. Petersburg by the Nazis a few years earlier.
In 1992, after the Soviet Union disintegrated, the German and Russian governments made an agreement of cultural cooperation and both countries are bogged down in the process of returning stolen treasures to their rightful owners but inevitably a lot of these items have found there way into private collections and are difficult to track down.
In addition to the stately palaces in Berlin, Breslau (Wroclaw), Posen (Poznań) and Potsdam the Kaiser also had a nice summer holiday palace called the Achilleion on the Greek island of Corfu which I visited a few years ago and is now an up-market casino that was used as a location for the James Bond film ‘For Your Eyes Only’ in 1981. Four Palaces and a summer home might sound extravagant but compare that to the present King of Spain, Juan Carlos, who has seven palaces in mainland Spain and a summer home on the island of Majorca.
There were no temporary exhibitions today to slow us down so we went straight ahead into the permanent museum display ‘1000 years of Wroclaw’ which starts on the ground floor at around the year 1000 and ascends through three floors and two extensive wings right up to the present day.
We quickly passed through the first two hundred years or so because much to Kim’s relief I am not especially interested in that period of history but I slowed the pace down through the medieval armoury section because I do admit fascination with those early weapons of mass destruction and through into the seventeenth century.
Then we crawled through one of my favourite periods of European history, the eighteenth century, and took our time too through the nineteenth and the period of German unification and Prussian expansion and here in the Yellow Living Room I unearthed my favourite fact about the Palace for it was here in 1813 that King Frederic William III made the Proclamation of the Iron Cross as a war medal.
We spent most time however on the top floor in the twentieth century with exhibits and photographs from the two world wars, the siege of Breslau, the expulsion of the German population, the communist era and then modern day Wroclaw.
It took about an hour and a half to walk through all the rooms which is about the upper limit of Kim’s museum patience and then before leaving and taking a short stroll in the Imperial gardens we stopped for a coffee in the massive basement café where we were the only customers this lunch time.
It was still cold and grey outside and the air smelt ominously of winter so we pulled our jackets tight and tightened our scarves and returned to the streets for the remainder of the afternoon.
A rather striking sculpture on the wall of the Hansel (Hansel and Gretal) house and the guide book says this about it:
“Hansel (house) features several bas-reliefs by local artist Eugeniusz Get-Stankiewicz, including a self-portrait. Get-Stankiewicz is a bit of a local legend and commonly regarded as one of the key movers in 1960s Polish counter-culture. Since 1995 the Hansel house has also doubled as his studio, which he rents from the city for a token one groszy coin per month.”
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Europe, Germany, History, Poland, Russia, Travel
Tagged Achilleion Corfu, Berlin, Breslau, Corfu, George Clooney, German Kaisers, Hohenzollern, Potsdam, Poznan, Prussian Kings, The Monuments Men, Wroclaw, Wroclaw Historical Museum
Have Bag, Will Travel 