Ellopos Blog

The most important feature of the Hellenistic age

Ellopos Blog — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:11:00 +0000

The most interesting, as well as the most important, feature of the Hellenistic age is the diffusion of Hellenic culture—the “Hellenizing” of the Orient. It was, indeed, a changed world in which men were now living. Greek cities, founded by Alexander and his successors, stretched from the Nile to the Indus, dotted the shores of the [...]

The New Acropolis Museum - Like looking at a family picture

Ellopos Blog — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:41:32 +0000

The Acropolis museum opening ceremony was attended by some 400 guests, including European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura, and foreign heads of state. Conspicuously, there were no government officials from Britain, which has repeatedly refused to repatriate dozens of 2,500-year-old sculptures from the Parthenon temple that are held in the British [...]

Macedonia as a leading part of Greece

Ellopos Blog — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:36:10 +0000

The land of Macedonia, lying to the north of Greece, for a long time had been an inconspicuous part of the ancient world. Its people, though only partially civilized, were Greeks in blood and language. The Macedonian kings, from the era of the Persian wars, seized every opportunity of spreading Greek culture throughout their realm. [...]

We should have the Acropolis as complete as possible

Ellopos Blog — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:34:11 +0000

Over the two centuries since workmen employed by the Scottish peer, Lord Elgin, began stripping the Parthenon in the early 1800s, various plaster casts have been made of the missing sections of frieze, enabling the curators of the new museum to reconstruct the complete sculptural narrative, mirroring the precise dimensions of the original. The absence of [...]

The stolen sculptures and the English people

Ellopos Blog — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:01:03 +0000

I wouldn’t be writing this post if I had not read some unfair, as I understand it, criticism of the English government/people/museum on the occasion of the new Acropolis museum in Greece and the right demand for the stolen marbles to be returned to where they belong. That the Acropolis sculptures are stolen I think is [...]

Scholars against the fabrication of history

Ellopos Blog — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:05:28 +0000

More than 300 scholars from all over the world sent a letter to president B. Obama calling upon him to help the government in Skopje understand that it cannot build a national identity at the expense of historic truth. They explain that “our common international society cannot survive when history is ignored, much less when [...]

The new Acropolis museum opens officially

Ellopos Blog — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:44:09 +0000

The Acropolis Museum was firstly conceived by Constantinos Karamanlis in September 1976, who also selected the site, upon which the Museum was finally built. With his penetrating vision, C. Karamanlis defined the need and established the means for a new Museum equipped with all technical facilities for the conservation of the invaluable Greek artifacts, where [...]

Constantinople - The City of the Holy Wisdom

Ellopos Blog — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:13:30 +0000

In the flourishing schools of Constantinople the wisest men of the day taught philosophy, law, medicine, and science to thousands of students. The professors figured among the important persons of the court: official documents mention the “prince of the rhetoricians” and the “consul of the philosophers.” Many of the emperors showed a taste for scholarship; one [...]

Multiculturalism is ignorance and ugliness

Ellopos Blog — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:14:18 +0000

Identifying freedom with doing “whatever we like”, being limited only by the others’ freedom, while in the same time praising the ancient democracy in Athens, we forget that even the ancient Athenian democracy sought the meaning of life mainly in religion, and, even more, we form a concept of freedom that is opposite to what [...]

Influences of Byzantine Art and Architecture

Ellopos Blog — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:05:50 +0000

Byzantine architecture, seen especially in the churches, became a leading form of art. Its most striking feature is the dome, which replaces the flat, wooden roof used in the basilican Churches of Italy. The exterior of a Byzantine church is plain and unimposing, but the interior is adorned on a magnificent scale. The eyes of [...]