End to 30-year Acropolis renovations in sight

A decades-long conservation effort at Greece's famed Acropolis monuments is nearing its end, culture officials announced Wednesday.

The extensive repairs to the Acropolis site will be completed by 2009, according to project architect Haralambos Bouras.

After that time, the conservators will be able to move onto smaller, secondary projects, he said.

Greek Deputy Culture Minister Petros Tatoulis said completing work quickly and on schedule is a priority, so that the scaffolding currently blocking the ancient monuments can be removed.

"We want to have as little scaffolding up as possible, as this creates an aesthetic problem," he told media Wednesday. "The visual pollution will be at a minimum."

Tatoulis also said that a budget of $16.6 million US had been set for work done in 2005 and 2006.

Begun in the mid-1970s, the ongoing project has involved painstaking repairs on major monuments, including the Parthenon, the Erechtheion and Athena Nike temples, and the Acropolis walls. The architectural masterpieces suffered from both pollution and a flawed reparation attempt in the 1930s, when workers used iron clamps in their repairs that eventually rusted and cracked the marble.

"We have removed the old iron, we have seen to the cracks," Bouras said, according to the Associated Press. "From then on, all the rest will be to improve the visual aspect of the monuments."

Preservation experts have drawn marble from the ancient quarries on Mount Pendeli, the site north of Athens where the ancient Greeks originally found the marble used to build the Acropolis monuments.

Officials estimate that all secondary work on the monuments will be complete by 2020 and are planning to commemorate the lengthy conservation process with a new website, a photo exhibition and a documentary film.