Greece has pulled two ancient statues from an ongoing Olympic Games exhibition in Qatar in a dispute over nudity, a Culture Ministry source said, because the organizers in the country wanted to cover the genitalia.
“The statues have already returned to Greece,” a Culture Ministry source told Agence-France-Presse, who added that, “Organizers in Qatar wanted to cover up the statues’ members with black cloth. So they were never put on display, they went back into storage and returned on April 19.”
The statues, a Classical Greek youth and a Roman-era copy of an athlete, are both nude, the manner in which Olympic athletes competed in antiquity.
Greece’s Assistant Culture Minister Costas Tzavaras had traveled to the Qatari capital of Doha for the opening of the exhibit on March 27, saying it opened a “bridge of friendship” between the two countries at a time when Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is wooing more investments from the Gulf State.
According to the Culture Ministry, Greece has contributed nearly 600 exhibits from the National Archaeological Museum, the Numismatic Museum and the Museum of Olympia, birthplace of the Games
The exposure of genitals on the statue was considered an insult to the strict customs of the country, mostly because the exhibition would be visited by women. When Greece rejected the idea to cover them, the organizers hid the statues, leading Greece to order them returned.
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