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Restorative cleaning of Athens monuments
The large-scale cleaning project on which the city of Athens has embarked in the run-up to the Olympic Games is now set to include several nineteenth and twentieth century monuments. This restorative cleaning work is being undertaken by German industrial concern Kärcher in cooperation with the non-profit organisation Ellada Kathari as part of a cultural sponsorship programme.
First to benefit was Greek sculptor Costas Varotsos’s The Runner, second the Kononio Wall of Pireas and finally the National Library of Greece.
Kärcher has realized some 80 cleaning projects on historic monuments in the last 16 years. In 1990, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and the statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro were subjected to gentle, expert cleaning. The largest-scale facade-cleaning operation on a work of architecture was performed in 1998 when Kärcher cleaned the colonnades on St Peter’s Square in Rome. Last year, Kärcher experts under the guidance of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo removed harmful dirt layers from the Colossi of Memnon in Luxor, Upper Egypt, which are more than 3,300 years old.
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