Acropolis Museum, Censorship, and Christian Revisionism.
In an excellent reversal of situations the Acropolis museum has decided to take back it’s previous act of censorship which it termed: “an effort to eliminate misunderstanding” and “not censorship at all”… to which I say, if you say so, a nods as good as a wink to a blind man.
So, what was all this “censorship” about anyway. Well the controversial Oscar-winning filmmaker Costa-Gavras produced a short animation for the newly opened museum, which included the destruction of parts of the Acropolis by Christians, a regular treat for “pagan” temples and structures during the Byzantine era. The Greek Orthodox church were enthused… sorry… um… angered by the clothes the animated figures are wearing, believing the black clothes indicated they were Greek orthodox priests. Because of course it would be ridiculous to suggest the the historic destruction of pagan temples had anything to do with the historic colonization of the Greek world by what would later become the Orthodox church… that’d just be crazy!
The orthodox church began a series of pickets and demonstrations, whilst on the other side human rights groups threatened legal action against censorship, and the museum thankfully decided to back down from its previous decision. Museum director Dimitris Pantermalis said in a statement:
“The informative film will continue to be shown,”
Whilst this was all going on, the enterprising world of cyberspace decided to simply bypass the censors and posted the animated film on youtube…. the offending part occurs from about 1 min 35 sec into the film…. enjoy!
It is not a big secret that a lot of byzantine churches replaced earlier “pagan” temples while using the marbles for their construction (one example is the monastery of Dafni which was build on the place of a previous temple of Apollo). Anyone who has visited these monuments and asked a bit about their history knows that, with or without the film. I am not sure why the church was offended…I believe that sensoring the film in the first place was a very bad decision by the museum’s director,and totally unnecessary. It is a real pity to see things like that happening, because the Acropolis museum itself is truly amazing! The church has too many sayings in Greece if you ask me.
Also it is interesting that the Greek press hasn’t published anything…I live in Greece and I learned about this from your blog!
Hi Manto,
Thanks for your comments, that’s surprising that this hasn’t been covered in the news there… I would have thought a nice bit of scandal would be very news worthy!! I think the museum looks great, I am looking forward to seeing more from it, and I am glad this unfortunate incident has past – hopefully they’ll have learnt from it.
I’m glad the blog can be a source of news… fantastic!
Cheers, Dan