That stereotype long predates the current crisis. The country that gave rise to Socrates and Plato, Myron and Phidias, Pindar and Sophocles, Pythagoras and Thucydides, today has no significant poets, composers, artists or philosophers.’ One article, titled ‘2,000 Years of Decline’, pronounced: ‘The modern Greeks prove their dissimilarity to their ancestors almost daily. In February 2010, Germany’s FOCUS magazine notoriously featured a doctored image of the Venus de Milo – one arm restored, flipping the bird – with the headline ‘Fraudsters in the Euro Family’. That nostalgia sometimes comes packaged in accusation. In the European West, after all, nostalgia for the marble-white Greece of Thucydides, Sophocles and Socrates runs deep. Politicians and media outlets alike regularly play off a version of the same old trope: the Greeks were great once, but today they’re a far cry from their ancestors. Comedy sketches call upon the Olympian gods to lampoon the Greek people for childish irresponsibility. Political cartoons abroad portray Greeks as lazy, corrupt and fiscally reckless.
Along the way, they’ve offered a series of lessons in adding insult to injury. For nearly seven and a half years, creditors have held the country in an economic stranglehold. John Danson (1893-1976).This May, Greece’s parliament passed yet another austerity bill in the hopes of securing more European debt relief. Important post-war acquisitions include the purchase of almost all of the classical collection from Norwich Castle Museum, which Liverpool was fortunate enough to acquire in 1956, and in 1977 an important collection of Greek pottery was bequeathed by Lt-Col. Much of Joseph Mayer's founding collection of Greek pottery was lost in the May Blitz of 1941 when the museum was destroyed by a fire. This wide-ranging collection includes pottery from the Geometric to Hellenistic period (8th to 4th centuries BC) and includes many pieces attributed to known individuals and workshops. Most of the 700 objects were collected by Robert Bosanquet (1871-1935) and John Droop (1882-1963), professors of classical archaeology at Liverpool University. There are also Minoan and Mycenaean pottery from sites on Cyprus and Egypt. The provenanced objects come from a wide range of sites in mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and Crete.
Object types include pottery, terracottas, sealstones, stone vases, stone figurines, stone tools, jewellery, bronzes and a rare Early Cyclladic II lead boat model.
World Museum is one of the few UK museums to have an Aegean collection of Cycladic, Minoan and Mycenaean artefacts. Please note this collection is not on display. Objects within the collection include Panathenaic prize amphorae, sculpture and those used by the ancient Greeks in their daily lives, such as drinking cups, jewellery and trinket boxes. One of the highlights is the important collection of material from the prehistoric Aegean, shedding light on the lives of the early Cycladic islanders, the Minoans on Crete, and the Mycenaeans on the Greek mainland.