Greek Culture Ministry

An ancient artifact, missing since German occupation, has been returned to Greece by Hanover's municipality and the August Kestner Museum, the Greek Culture Ministry announced on Tuesday.

The artifact, a 620-600 BC three-leaf oinochoe with a lid, resurfaced with inscribed decoration. Initially acquired in 1986, the museum confirmed its illegal removal during Nazi rule.

The Greek Culture Ministry said Wednesday it would seek the repatriation from New York of a 2,700-year-old bronze horse statuette which it says was illegally exported from Greece, after a US court rejected an auction house's bid to proceed with the sale of the artifact.

Tracing the history of the Greek capital Athens, we can see not only the sacred rock of the classical Acropolis but a mixture of the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman eras.

Even though Greece was under Ottoman rule for almost four centuries, few remains of that period are visible now.

The Greek Culture Ministry is putting together an interdisciplinary committee of experts who will be responsible for drawing up a national action plan to tackle the impact of climate change on the country's archaeological sites and historic monuments.

The Greek Culture Ministry's advisory body on the protection of antiquities, the Central Archaeological Council (KAS), ruled that the small, uninhabited island of Makronissos is an area of archaeological interest.

The proposal came from the Cyclades Ephorate of Antiquities which is conducting field expeditions on the island in the past few years and the decision came on July 2.

A man and a child view a display at the 'Treasures of Ancient Greece: Life, Myth and Heroes' exhibition at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis in the US. Co-organized by the Greek Culture Ministry, the exhibition includes 150 items taken from 20 major Greek museums and seeks to familiarize the American public, and children especially, with the achievements of ancient Greek civilization.

Firefighters were able to quickly contain a fire that broke out on Monday morning at the Numismatic Museum of Athens, the Greek Culture Ministry said in a statement.

No exhibits were damaged in the blaze which is believed to have been caused by a short-circuit in an airconditioning unit on the second floor of the building, the statement said.

The Badisches Landesmuseum in Karlsruhe, Germany, is dedicating a major exhibition to the Bronze Age civilization of the Mycenaeans.

Titled "Mycenae - The Legendary World of Agamemnon," the exhibition runs to June next year and aims to provide comprehensive insights into the Mycenaean era, which stretched from 1600 to 1200 BC.

The Greek Culture Ministry has condemned the destruction of a statue at a public square on Athens's southern coast that religious zealots said symbolized Satan.

Nikolaos Platon was known for never exaggerating, however wild his archaeological adventures may have seemed. Slight and modest, with a PhD from Paris, he was one of the unlikely heroes of occupied Greece in World War II, defending the country's monuments at any cost.