Athens - Greece is to open the gates of the New Acropolis Museum later on Saturday after years of delays, hoping the state-of-the-art building will one day display the Parthenon sculptures currently at London's British Museum.

Hundreds of dignitaries from around the world will attend the official inauguration at the foot of the Acropolis, including European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Greek officials intially wanted the museum to be ready in time for the 2004 Olympics but protests and bureaucratic delays, including the remains of a millennia-old city unearthed during construction, pushed back the project.

Officials hope the glass-and-concrete museum will demonstrate once and for all that the Greeks can look after the hundreds of marble sculptures, friezes and metopes from the ancient Acropolis as well as, if not better than, the British Museum that has housed them for close to two centuries.

More than half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures were removed from the temple by Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th century, and sold to the British Museum. Greece was then under Turkish rule.

Britain's government maintains that the sculptures, known as the Elgin Marbles, which include depictions of religious and mythological scenes, legally belong to the British Museum and insists that they will not be returned.

Athens says the sculptures were stolen from a monument of such importance that its surviving pieces should all be united and exhibited together.

Spreading across three levels, the 14,000-square-metre museum displays more than 4,000 artifacts and sculptures dating from the 5th century Archaic period. The pieces were previously held in a small museum atop the Acropolis or in other museums across Greece.

The museum makes use of natural light and is equipped with elevated ramps, visitors enter large halls and walk up a wide staircase, reminiscent of the climb up to the monumental Propylaia entrance towards the Parthenon temple.

Located at the top-floor gallery lies the museum's centerpiece and probably the Greek government's best leverage for the marbles' return.

Enclosed entirely in glass and rotated 23 degrees to be aligned parallel to the Parthenon, which is only 244 metres away, the gallery provides visitors with a direct view of the ancient temple.

The floor layout mimics the main temple whose 160-metre-long frieze has been mounted in an unbroken sequence, with the original blocks of the frieze coated in a soft brown patina standing alongside the white plaster copies of the pieces removed by Elgin.

The museum is expected to host over 10,000 visitors a day. Admission was set at 1 euro (1.4 dollars), the same price as a bus ticket in Athens. (dpa)