Give them back

It looks stunning and opens on Saturday. It is the new Acropolis Museum in Athens.

Those of us who know and love Greece will recognise this from Stephen Moss' preview.

"Forgive me, it is crazy," says Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis, president of the Organisation for the Construction ... "We told the construction company about this a year ago," he says, as we pass a group of workmen who are adjusting cables, "and they leave it until the week before the opening."

It will be ready.

What will be missing though are the sections of the Parthenon sculptures sitting in the British Museum. They will be replaced by plaster casts of the originals. Removed by Lord Elgin in the early 19th Century in controversial circumstances and acquired by the museum in 1816, surely it is now time that they were returned.

UPDATE

See here as well