To celebrate its 10th anniversary, Greece’s Acropolis Museum has opened a new exhibition to the public— offering visitors a unique look into an ancient Athenian neighborhood.
The exhibition covers the area directly under the museum’s existing structure and reveals the neighborhood that was unearthed during the museum’s construction.
Visitors are able to walk through the ancient Athenian neighborhood that survived from Classical to Byzantine times and see how residents lived thousands of years ago.
Open to the public for the first time is a neighborhood of excavated homes, workshops, baths and streets.
The Acropolis Museum was actually built on top of this neighborhood, with its base resting on heavy pillars that have been meticulously placed amongst the ruins.
Up to now, visitors were able to get a glimpse below, only from a viewing area on the entrance level of the museum.
The Acropolis Museum director, Dimitris Pantermalis, recently spoke about the newly opened area with Reuters reporters.
“Visitors can come down and see ancient ruins of the city of Athens, especially in the area south of the Acropolis” he said.
Visitors will see luxurious ancient houses, some of which included rooms where bathers could warm up before entering heated pools.
The Acropolis Museum has welcomed more than 14 million visitors since it opened doors 10 years ago.
The museum, which was built to house the Parthenon Marbles, sits at the edge of the Acropolis hill in Athens.
Although considered one of the finest, state-of-the-art museums in the world, the marble statues that once adorned the Parthenon temple are on display at the British Museum in London and still have not made their way to what was intended to be their permanent home, inside a special gallery built exclusively for the treasures.
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