This past weekend in Athens, three cranes began the work of moving antiquities to their new home in the long awaited new Acropolis Museum. The process will take months, but began on Sunday, with crews moving a 2.3-ton section of the Parthenon frieze: a 160-meter-long strip sculpted in relief with some 360 human and 250 animal figures from a religious procession. From the terrace of our Acropolis View penthouse, we watched in the distance as the cranes moved in slowly and surely. While the media covered this story, heralding the historic nature of this event, we noted a radio story here in Athens which provided an even more historical event: one of the three crane operators is a Ukrainian woman, trained to work on cranes in the Ukraine, but unable, despite tremendous experience, to find work in her field when she emigrated to Greece. Finally, with the support of the crane operators union, she landed her first job in Greece. Once her employers saw how skilled she was, finding work, despite the “handicap” of her gender, was no longer a problem.
