situation. We are not insensitive to what it means to remove the remnants of a great monument from their original location and bring them to a place where we can never again provide the lighting and environment in which they were created and in which they once conveyed their full effect. But we did rescue them from a destruction that was becoming ever more complete. There was not yet an Osman Hamdi Bey around, who soon became a close friend of Humann, and at the time we could not imagine what has become possible in the meantime with his help, that the ruins still at the site could be protected from the stone robbers of the modern city ... The Pergamon Altar in Berlin The pieces could not initially be presented in an appropriate exhibition context and were placed in the overfilled Altes Museum, where especially the Telephus frieze could not be well displayed (the individual slabs were simply leant against the wall facing the altar). For this reason a new purpose-built museum was erected. The first "Pergamon Museum" was built between 1897 and 1899 by Fritz Wolff and opened in 1901 with the unveiling of a bust of Carl Humann by Adolf Brütt. This building was used until 1908 but was regarded as being only an interim solution and was accordingly called the "temporary building". Originally four archaeological museums were planned, one of them for the Pergamon Altar. But the first museum had to be demolished because of problems with the foundation. Also, it had originally been intended only for finds which could not be presented in the other three archaeological museums and thus from the beginning it was too small for the altar. After the museum was demolished, the Telephus frieze was set into the walls of the colonnade on the eastern side of the Neues Museum, but with windows allowing a view of the art objects. The new building, designed by Alfred Messel, took until 1930 to construct, due to delays caused by World War I, the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the hyperinflation of 1922/1923. This new Pergamon Museum presented the altar basically as it is seen today. There was a partial reconstruction in the central gallery of the museum with the frieze fragments installed on the surrounding walls. The Telephus frieze is, as in the original construction, reached via the flight of stairs, but only