“Maybe the British Museum refuses to give back the Elgin Marbles but we will offer an entire Acropolis as a gift to the Acropolis Museum”, joked Michael Turner, senior curator of the Nicholson Museum in Sydney.
LEGO Oedipus, LEGO Lord Elgin and LEGO Sigmund Freud are already on their way to Greece, as part of a generous gift from Sydney’s Nicholson Museum to the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
Creator of the LEGO Acropolis is Ryan McNaught, the only LEGO-certified professional in the southern hemisphere. It took him about 300 hours to build it using more than 120,000 LEGO bricks.
The work shows Acropolis faithfully recreated following the model features of Parthenon, the Temple of Athena Nike, the smaller temple of Erechtheion and the site’s monumental gateway, Propylaea.
A lot of ancient figures can also be spotted in the model, such as LEGO Theseus in the labyrinth facing a LEGO Minotaur, LEGO Elton John performing for tourists or LEGO Lord Elgin stealing the marble statues of the Parthenon.
LEGO Acropolis has attracted more than 100,000 visitors at Nicholson Museum, while its last exhibit LEGO Colosseum attracted 90,000 visitors in 2012.
Michael Turner says the Acropolis Museum contacted him, asking if it could borrow the model to attract younger visitors.
“This could only happen in my wildest dreams,” Turner says. “After a sleepless night, finding difficult to believe how honorable the Greek request was, I got back to the museum and said no, they couldn’t borrow it. We’d give it to them for free!”
LEGO Acropolis shall arrive at the Acropolis Museum this week, while Nicholson Museum is to present a new model, Lego Pompeii, in January.
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