Cycladic encyclical

After the (mis)adventure on the Road of the Towers, I decided to have a quieter weekend, and get some reading done in Athens itself, as well as taking in a museum. As excavators in the Agora, we were all issued with free entry passes to museums and archaeological sites owned by the Greek state. Except, that is, for those of us (like me) who already had a free entry pass from being past members of the American School, who simply brought last year's pass with us (they're valid for three years). The stipulations 'owned by the Greek state' can be important, as I learned on Hydra, where I was denied free entry to the local private historical museum.

The staff at the Cycladic Museum were happy to let me in for free, even though it's also a private institution: set up in 1986 to house the collection of the businessman and art enthusiast N.P. Goulandris, it continues to receive funding from his foundation. The Museum of Cycladic Art is its official name, and also something of a misnomer. The first floor is indeed full of the simple yet haunting figurines that can be found in the small Cycladic rooms appended to the Greek collections of major institutions such as the British Museum. The second floor, though, holds a fairly representative selection of all the major periods of Greek art, with a bias towards Athens in the classical period (which I won't be complaining about). The top floor is devoted, surprisingly but pleasantly enough, to antiquities from all periods of the Cypriot past.

The museum is well laid out, has some splendid individual items, and also features video presentations on how red- and black-figure were manufactured that are so good that I was actually convinced I understood it until I tried to summarize the process to some archaeologists. But the focus of most visitors will be on the Cycladic figurines, which project a kind of unapologetic naïvety that used to be called 'primitive' and that proved inspirational to modernist sculptors such as Giacometti. The Cycladic Museum has a floorfull of them, and - if you believe an American archaeologist that I heard lecture last summer - three quarters of them are forgeries. The issue is that there's no record of where most of the figurines were found. Many were simply acquired from the antiquities market, which obviously had an incentive to produce them. Their graceful simplicity may not have helped, making them relatively easy to fake.

Whatever the truth of that archaeologist's claims - he also claimed that Schliemann forged parts of the artifacts he discovered at Mycenae - there are other issues that often come to mind when I visit Greek museums. (I visited rather a lot of them last summer, as a member of the American School.) In general I have to say that I'm usually extremely impressed: I've been to a great number of large, clean, air-conditioned museums where the antiquities are treated and displayed in an exemplary way. All the same, a large number of these expensive-looking museums I've been to were in out of the way places, and it sometimes seemed when we got there that we were the only guests that day - or maybe even that week.

The Greeks have clearly demonstrated beyond any doubt that they can take care of antiquities, and make them accessible to any tourist who wants to come see them. It may seem churlish in that context to raise some further questions, but a couple that spring to mind are, 'How did they pay for all this?', and 'How are they still paying for this, with all that's been going on here?' Certainly, if my own experience and what I've heard from others is anything to go by, the deepening financial crisis and the austerity measures it has necessitated have led to fewer staff at many national museums (meaning, for example, that I was unable to look at archaic Athenian coins at the Numismatic Museum, something I am complaining about).

In many cases, museums proudly display signs with a circle of stars against a blue background declaring that they were constructed with, and continue to enjoy financial support from, the EU. (I always notice EU flags in Greece, since they're so common here and comparatively so rare in the UK). At other times (as in the case of the Cycladic Museum or the similarly enjoyable Benaki Museum a stone's throw up the road), the museums are privately funded. A few high-profile projects (such as, if I'm not mistaken, the impressive new Acropolis Museum) are funded solely by the Greek State; though of course, receiving outside funds for some museums makes it easier for a country to bankroll others.

In the context of the debate about repatriating certain ancient Greek artifacts, it would seem only fair to point out two facts. The first - already stated, it bears repeating - is that Greeks have clearly possessed the expertise and reverence necessary to protect and display classical monuments for quite some time now. The second is that they have done so partly due to subsidies by the wealthier countries of the EU, chief among them Germany. This is not necessarily to say that classical artworks should not stay in Greece, or that they should not be returned from other EU nations. But it is to stress that Greeks will either need to make their museums fully independent of EU funding, or come to think of the great works of the classical past not as jealously guarded national possessions, but as the common heritage of all Europeans. What the Greeks certainly can't afford - and what may not be particularly popular among the younger generation in any case - is a narrow-minded cultural nationalism. Once again, the economic structure of Europe can be seen to be dictating its politics, and perhaps even its culture.