ATHENS (Reuters) – Greece inaugurated its  long-delayed Acropolis Museum yesterday with the prime  minister calling for the Classical Parthenon marbles, held in  Britain for 200 years, to be repatriated.
  
The 2,500-year-old sculptures were removed from the  Parthenon in 1806 by Lord Elgin, then British ambassador to the  Ottoman empire.  

“All the marbles have to come back … it is not only the Greeks but the whole world that is asking for this,” Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis told the opening ceremony, attended  by some 400 dignitaries from around the world.
  
Planned to remind visitors of the 5th century BC monument visible across the street, the museum’s top floor layout mimics the main temple of the Acropolis, the Parthenon. The display  shows where those sculptures housed in the British Museum in  London, would fit.  

“The Parthenon marbles will be reunited here, in the  Acropolis Museum,” Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said.
  
The British Museum long refused to return the sculptures, saying Greece had nowhere to display the marbles. The construction of the new museum has not changed its stance.   The crowd of dignitaries were taken to a tour of the 14,000  metre (150,000 square foot) museum, with particular focus on the  missing pieces. White plaster molds of Olympian gods, heroes and  animals, fill in the gaps of slabs now in London.

“The head of Athena is in Athens, the torso is in the  British Museum,” Dimitrios Pantermalis, President of the  museum’s board of directors said, guiding the visitors. “Some of  these horses are in Athens but their heads are in London.”  

While Greece has said a loan would not be good enough,  Bonnie Greer, deputy chair of the British Museum’s board of  trustees, who attended the ceremony, reiterated this idea.
  
“We’ve never been asked to loan them, and that is what we  are waiting for,” she told Reuters.  
Plagued by protests and bureaucratic delays for decades the  museum will open to visitors today for one euro. Tickets for the first three days, available only on the Internet, have sold  out.