'Please do touch the objects'Athens tactual museum for blind

Visually-impaired Athens Paralympic officials feel the statue of the Venus of Milo at the Tactual Museum in Athens.

ATHENS (AFP) - A small museum in Athens offers blind people a rare chance to literally get in touch with great works of art otherwise kept from them behind plexiglas and protected by hi-tech sensors.

"Thank you for helping us discover so much," an anonymous French visitor noted in the guestbook of the Tactual Museum in the Athens quarter of Kallithea.


Visually-impaired Athens Paralympic official feels of an sculpture in the Tactual Museum in Athens.

"If you want to see the Venus de Milo you have to go to the Louvre in Paris. But if you want to touch her you'd better come here," Dimitra Asideri, the museum's director, told AFP.

Opened in 1984, the museum displays exact, original-size plaster copies of more than 80 works of ancient Greek masterpieces and bas-relief representations, including famous statues such as the Venus de Milo, the Charioteer of Delphi and the Zeus or Poseidon of Artemision.


Visually-impaired Athens Paralympic official feels of the statue of the Venus of Milo at the Tactual Museum in Athens


Accessible clay models of the Athens Acropolis with its landmark Parthenon temple are also on show.

Adjacent inscriptions in the Greek version of the Braille language for the blind describe the exhibits. Since the Athens Paralympics began last Friday, non-Greek visitors receive headphones offering guided tours in English.

"Contrary to other institutions, we actually encourage visitors to touch the exhibits. To our knowledge, there are just four or five museums like ours across the world," Asideris said.

"It is so nice to be in a museum when they don't shout at you for getting near the exhibits," read the guestbook inscription of Nigel Howard, another visitor.

"Every museum in the world should have a room with replicas for the visually-impaired," said Asideri.

"I remember once, when I was in the British Museum in London, I simply refused to leave if they did not allow me to touch the ancient Greek marbles they have there," she said laughing.

The Tactual Museum is located in the old offices of the Lighthouse for the Blind, a US-sponsored group founded in 1946 to offer jobs and services to visually-impaired people in devastated post-war Greece.

Damaged in a severe earthquake in 1999, the museum reopened in March, just six months before the Paralympics.

A separate room opened specially for last month's Olympics, and the Paralympics. It features carved maps and pictures for the blind depicting the Games' mascots and all competition sites in their greater Athens area. In their midst stands a replica of one of the most celebrated ancient sculptures, the Hermes of Praxiteles.

"That was the most expensive remake we have. It cost around 7,500 euros (9,100 dollars)," Asideri said.

All the sculptures remakes were made by a state-authorized workshop of Greece's Culture Ministry. The museum relies entirely on volunteers for its operation. It extends to two floors and is -- naturally -- accessible to people in wheelchairs.



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