Mycenae display on view at last
Thousands of finds from Mycenae, the prehistoric city immortalized by Homer and one of Greece’s major tourist attractions, went on public view yesterday in a new museum built next to the ancient site. The inauguration came nearly 130 years after the sensational discovery, by Heinrich Schliemann, of a series of richly furnished graves associated with the semi-mythical dynasty of kings who ruled Mycenae from the 17th to the 12th centuries BC and, during the reign of Agamemnon, led the Greeks to war against Troy. The 2,000-square-meter building, officially opened late on Thursday by Culture Minister Evangelos Venizelos, was completed in 1997 but stood empty for most of the next six years as archaeologists worked through some 35,000 finds from Mycenae stored at the museum of Nafplion to select and organize the display of 2,500 artifacts. However, the cream of the finds from Mycenae, including the gold funerary masks and the lavishly decorated weapons discovered by Schliemann, will remain at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
