The ancient statues depict young men, naked and muscled, in their physical prime. The two sculptures were supposed to celebrate the purity and kinetic beauty of ancient sport in a traveling exhibit, "The Olympics — Past and Present."

But when the Greek exhibit reached the conservative Muslim emirate of Qatar, the two statues were placed behind a screen of sheer black cloth.

"The outlines of the statues were visible, but not the details," says Maria Vlazaki, the Greek Culture Ministry's director-general of antiquities and cultural heritage. "They wanted to hide the nudity." Vlazaki was part of a Greek delegation that traveled to the Qatari capital Doha for the opening of the exhibit in March

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