Alexander at the Louvre
Can 36 centuries of history fit into one museum? Can nine museums, antiquities ephorates, 668 witnesses of history, an entire country fit into one hall – even the largest – in 1,100 square meters of a museum? The Louvre, the leading Parisian museum with 8.5 million visitors annually, is attempting it. With the exhibition “Ancient Macedonia: In the Kingdom of Alexander the Great”.
The “Napoleon” wing on the first floor of the museum is already empty, the display cases and dividers have been set up and the hundreds of bulky boxes with the 668 objects that will tell the history of Macedonia and Alexander the Great in detail to its visitors are waiting.
The first exhibit that visitors will see from October 13 is the huge mosaic with the “Lion Hunt” (325 BC) from the Museum of Pella – the only one presented in a copy. All the other works are authentic: gold wreaths (with the central and top exhibit being the one that was unveiled in the summer of 2008 in Vergina by Professor Chrysoula Paliadeli), jewelry, marble statues, bronze sculptures, figurines, war equipment, ceramic offerings, as well as tools and objects of everyday use.
In Greece, preparations are continuing feverishly. The 668 objects, in collaboration with eleven antiquities ephorates of Northern Greece and the Archaeological Museums of Thessaloniki, Pella, Dion, Vergina, Aiani and Florina, were removed from the display cases, packed into hundreds of boxes and, starting yesterday, their four total shipments to Athens and from there by air to Paris began.
Preparations had begun last year. The investigative visits of Sophie Deschamps, director of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the Louvre, began in 2003.
Since 2007, the Greek Ministry of Culture has assigned the scientific supervision to archaeologists Polyxeni Adam-Veleni, director of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Maria Akamati and Lilian Achilara, heads of the 16th and 17th Ephorates of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities respectively.
“The French know Alexander the Great as a great Greek. The exhibition will be an amazing opportunity not only for the French and visitors of all nationalities to the Louvre Museum to get to know his kingdom – ancient Greek Macedonia – but also the timelessness of the “myth” of Alexander the Great,” Sophie Deschamps, director of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the Louvre, told “NEA”.
With a budget exceeding two million euros, the exhibition is already being promoted by the French museum as one of the most important, given that it “brings the general public into contact for the first time with the treasures of Northern Greece that have come to light from the research of recent decades.”
“The exhibition,” Sophie Deschamps explained to “NEA”, “will not be a simple display of finds from Macedonia, but in many cases archaeological ensembles will be reunited, based on finds that were brought to the Louvre by French travelers and archaeologists in the 19th century.”
