Greek Ministry of Culture Nixes Coca-Cola's Unsightly "greenhouse"style structure that's blocking view of Panathenaic Stadium
Decision comes as a welcome check on corporate abuse of the public space
Do not mess with Greece’s Minister of Culture, Lina Mendoni. It is hard to think of a more capable custodian of a country’s unique cultural heritage than Ms. Medoni, regardless of country. Her remit is large — consider that Greece has thousands of years of cultural heritage to guard and protect.
So if a big company like Coca-Cola thinks they can just march into the center of Athens and throw up some kind of temporary structure in front of the world’s only all marble stadium well, what were they thinking?
We were walking past the Panathenaic Stadium, or Kallimarmaro as the Greeks call it, on March 27 and noticed the sort of glassy metal monstrosity that the geniuses at Coke had thrown up in front of it, pretty much blocking the view. Earlier this month moving light renditions of paintings by a gifted artist were projected onto the stadium, which might have raised some eyebrows, but it was nighttime and didn’t last long. This is different.
It’s worth noting that Coca-Cola HBC is based in Switzerland, that great moral compass among nations, where even the national airline isn’t really Swiss. Anyway, whatever event they were hoping to plan in front of the stadium has now been canceled.
This comes after Dimokratia (pictured above) reported on the story and the ensuing uproar, in which Ms. Medoni intervened to block what that newspaper called “the makeshift construction-abscess that has been installed in front of Kallimarmaros, ‘swallowing’ the entire stadium and cutting off the magnificent view to passers-by, but also to tourists who would like to admire — but cannot — one of the most emblematic monuments of world heritage.”
The paper continued: “Both for this Vlach Baroque aesthetic, which signed the death sentence of the... ancient immortal spirit, and for the indignation that prevails among visitors, who travel from every corner of the planet to admire -and- the historic ancient stadium of Athens, but return disappointed to their countries (ed.: according to information, shortly after March 20, when this improvised ‘monstrosity’ construction began to be erected, the drivers of the tourist buses, which — under normal circumstances — would pass in front of Kallimarmaro, without stopping, are now looking for ways for tourists to see the stadium and get at least a small "taste" of it!)”
So basically, this was, at the very least, a hot aesthetic mess and also, according the Ministry of Culture, a violation of a law “On the Protection of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage in General”.
Apparently the unsightly structure will still be up for a few more days, because it will take some time to dismantle it. That means the tourists who probably paid a lot of money to come to Athens right now will have to rely on Photoshop to extract Coke’s mistake from their Instagram feeds.
