BCRPM congratulate the British Museum for the hugely successful 'Rodin And the Art of Ancient Greece' exhibition (26 April - 29 July 2018) and Janet Suzman, BCRPM's Chair, adds that this is the right time to consider reuniting the sculptures from the Parthenon in the Acropolis Museum. 

12 April 2018, Philip Stephens wrote in the Financial Times:

The west's great museums should return their looted treasures.
He refers to the case of the Parthenon Marbles: "To my mind, it also seems perfectly obvious that Lord Byron was right and the Parthenon sculptures belong to Athens, whatever the deal struck by Lord Elgin and the then Ottoman rulers of Greece. I concede, though, that this is a dispute with some way to run. But "hard" cases should not be allowed to obstruct just settlement in instances of egregious looting. The wider debate may not go away, but restitution in these cases would take the museums on to higher ethical ground."

23 April 2018, Donald Lee for the Art Newspaper, wrote: 

Rodin's debt to Parthenon sculptures explored in British Museum exhibition.

In the exhibition Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece, the British Museum makes clear Rodin's close study and use of the museum's own ancient Greek art for the development of his sculpture.

To read the full article, click here 

24 April 2018 , Melanie Mcdonagh writes in the Evening Standard

Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece Reviewed. The master sculptor meets the Greek greats at the British Museum.

If ever there were an exhibition that plays to a museum's strengths, it's this one. Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece is about the artist's obsession with Greek statuary in general and the Elgin Marbles in particular. So the exhibition is a kind of dialogue between Rodin and the artefacts of the museum, which he first visited in 1881 and loved.

24 April 2018, Jonathan Jones writes in the Guardian:

British Museum, London
The Frenchman made some of the best loved sculptures in the world. But his magnificent work is still no match for the Parthenon Marbles. My god, what art!

26 April 2018, Michael Glover also reveiwed the Rodin exhibition in the Independent. He wrote that there's 'a lovely, easy panache to this show'.

26 April 2018, the Greek Ambassador in London, H E Dimitris Caramitsos-Tziras wrote to Hartwig Fischer, Director of the British Museum, you can read his letter here.

28 April, 2018, Hettie Judah's article entitled: 'Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece, British Museum, review: remarkably handsome and unabashedly sensual'. 

The exhibition is not so gauche as to explicitly suggest the influence of the Elgin Marbles on Rodin as any kind of rationale for keeping them at the museum – more it acknowledges the regard in which they were and are held by artists, and the influence they have had on Western European sculpture.

To read BCRPM's press release, visit here.

05 January 2022, The Telegraph

Nick Squires in the Telegraph: 'Britain should put best foot forward like Italy and give Elgin Marbles back, says Greece.'Athens museum chief hopes return of stone foot fragment from Sicily will put pressure on British Museum to return large friezes.'

“Good for Sicily,” said Janet Suzman, the chairman of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles. “We expect the British Museum to make a more magnanimous gesture.

I cannot think of a single argument in favour of keeping the legacy of Greece locked in Bloomsbury. Certain things must be returned and the Parthenon Marbles deserve to be reunited in the Acropolis Museum.”

To read the article in full, follow the link to the Telegraph.

The Guardian, Angela Giuffrida

Italy returns Parthenon fragment to Greece amid UK row over marbles.

Loan deal could renew pressure on Britain to repatriate ancient Parthenon marbles to Athens.

The Antonino Salinas Regional Archaeological Museum in Palermo, Sicily, returns to the Acropolis Museum, the foot of a goddess for a loan period of four years to be extended by a further four years. However, the move back to Greece could eventually become permanent.

The fragment was loaned to Greece in 2002 and in 2008. Sicily’s councillor for culture, Alberto Samonà said the latest transfer could become permanent, but that it would be up to the Italian culture ministry to take the measures needed to make that happen.

To read the article in full, follow the link to the Guardian.

Acropolis Museum, 03 January 2022

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis speaking (in Greek) on Monday 03 January at the Acropolis Museum when 10 Parthenon Marble fragments were transferred from the National Archaeological Museum to the Acropolis Museum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gozU5WyrOoM

"Precious fragments of the Parthenon Sculptures were reunited today in the Acropolis Museum. It was a small but significant step, and I hope others now play their part in completing this important journey to reunify a truly unique monument of human civilisation."

22 August 2019 during a State visit to France, Greece's Prime Minister Mitsotakis asked President Macron for the loan from the Louvre of a metope.This request was made for Greece's bicentennial independence celebrations in 2021. The Louvre would, in return, receive a collection of bronze artefacts from Greece. 

Paul Cartledge, professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge and the vice chairman of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles and the IARPS (International Association) commented to The Art Newspaper: " We hope for and expect much more: the reunification in the Acropolis Museum of all bits of the Parthenon held in museums outside Greece—not only [the sculptures] from the British Museum. The Greek government will certainly reciprocate most handsomely with spectacular loans, such as those going to the Louvre no doubt will be.”

To read The Art Newspaper article, please follow the link here.

On 22 March, Alexander Herman wrote an article also in The Art Newspaper explaining the difficulties that surround recognition and admission of title. If the British Museum were ever to consider a long-term loan of the pieces, Greece would need to first accept that the trustees hold title, an acceptance successive Greek governments have never been willing to make.

"But title need not be so contentious. Perhaps the Greek government could accept the simple premise that the trustees hold title under English law, but go no further? This would not have to relate to the circumstances of acquisition in Athens. It need only be a recognition that a run-of-the-mill Act of Parliament settled the question of English title back in 1816. Likewise, the British Museum would need to understand that title is a nationally derived right and does not automatically guarantee rights at an international level. This could perhaps allow the parties to put the question of title aside" writes Alexander Herman.

While a loan might not result in Greece's long awaited permanent restitution, it would bring some pieces back to the Acropolis Museum, where they would be seen by millions in their original context with views to the Parthenon, which still stands. Marking a memorable event and breaking of the deadlock by starting a dialogue between London and Athens.

Read more on this article here.

31 August & 01 September Helena Smith reported in the Guardian and Observer that Prime Minister Mitsotakis would be looking for a loan from the British Museum to coincide with Greece's bicentennial independence celebrations in 2021.

Prime Minister Mitsotakis explained that “given the significance of 2021, I will propose to Boris: ‘As a first move, loan me the sculptures for a certain period of time and I will send you very important artefacts that have never left Greece to be exhibited in the British Museum’.”

Adding: “Of course our demand for the return of the sculptures remains in place. I don’t think [Britain] should be fighting a losing battle. Eventually this is going to be a losing battle. At the end of the day there is going to be mounting pressure on this issue.”

There are 21,000 known archaeological sites in Greece,” said the culture minister, Lina Mendoni, a classical archaeologist. “We have 10 times more than we can possibly exhibit. Almost every day something valuable is found. We want to export these cultural assets.”

Read the updated Guardian (04 September 2019) article here.

To the Editor, The Guardian

I know that Simon Jenkins is fundamentally on the same side as I am, and I'm sure it wasn't he who chose to put that offensive phrase in his headline (A banana republic police HQ maybe, but not a home for the Elgin marbles, 23 October). But his piece did contain more than its fair share of anti-Greek prejudice. The Greeks were 'foolish' to turn down the offer of a loan of the Elgin Marbles this summer (a heavily conditional offer, confined to a few pieces, never officially proposed and withdrawn as soon as mooted). They have consigned the excavated ancient site under the new museum to a 'surreal dungeon' (unfair: it is to be open to visitors). And Jenkins cannot have it both ways: if the Greeks previously 'spoiled their case' for restitution of the Marbles by shortcomings in conservation, then he should not be complaining now that the restoration works on the Acropolis are so painstaking.
Anyway, the Greeks have now 'gone to the other extreme' with a building that 'screams the supremacy of Big Modernism' and looks like 'the police headquarters of a banana republic': Bernard Tschumi's New Acropolis Museum in Athens, which is the real target here. Comment is free, and a whole series of other expert architectural critics have commended Tschumi's building for exactly the opposite quality - 'handsome', 'unassuming', 'minimalist', 'unpretentious' - to what Jenkins detects. Simon Jenkins prefers the interior to the exterior: fair enough, so do many of us. But there was no call to package his criticism in this offensive wrapping paper.

Anthony Snodgrass
Chair, British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles

Thursday 22 October 2009, Simon Jenkins for The Guardian

A banana republic police HQ maybe, but not a home for the Elgin marbles

I am a restitutionist – but the new museum fails to clinch the case. It is not so much an argument as a punch in the face.

In 1812 Lord Elgin loaded the last of his Acropolis sculptures on to ships in Piraeus and set sail for England. Four years later and bankrupt, he sold them to the British Museum. This summer the Greeks, eager for their return, staged what they hoped would be a definitive retort by opening a £110m museum to house the marbles against the slopes of the same Acropolis. It is the most costly poison-pen letter in the history of cultural exchange.

Any lawyer can prove anything, and I happen to agree with those who regard the Elgin marbles as legally Britain's. But in any meaningful sense, they "belong" in Athens. As 56 of the surviving 94 panels of the Panathenaic procession, they should rejoin the 36 in the new museum. Precedent is not an issue, being the last refuge of reactionaries and those who have lost an argument. The Elgin marbles are, to put it mildly, a special case.

To me, architectural sculpture belongs on the building to which it was once attached. If it cannot be re-attached then it belongs in its climate, culture and context. The restitution of the marbles to Greece was thus always a noble goal of cultural diplomacy. Whenever I visited Athens, I came away ashamed at Britain's insistence that it would never return them, but this was coupled with sadness that the polluted, un-conserved and undistinguished city of Athens seemed determined to undermine its case.

Athens has now cleaned its air and its city. Last week the view of the Acropolis from the adjacent hill of Lycabettus was glorious, with the streets subdued in mist below and the deep blue bay of Phaleron shimmering in the distance. The sunlit slopes of the Acropolis were rid of traffic and immaculately landscaped. Athens seemed on its best behaviour. So was the case for restitution clinched?

I have to admit that, if anything, the case is weakened. When restitution was a futurist fantasy, idealism could rule the day. Sending back the marbles was part of a dream, in which the Parthenon itself might be restored, as the Stoa of Attalus in the agora has been restored. Perhaps the marbles might find their way back on to the temple. Perhaps a museum might be built for the entire frieze, completed with not only Elgin's panels, but missing ones conjectured from the original Pantelic quarries. Perhaps they might be repainted.

Today we can see what restitution would mean in practice. The argument has been hijacked by the gods of modern museology. Just as previously the Greeks spoiled their case by their conservation shortcomings, now they have gone to the other extreme and put their cause in the hands of archaeologists and architects – stripping it of all passion.

The new museum, designed in pastiche Corbusian style by the Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, is not so much an argument as a punch in the face. It is big and brutal, like something flown in overnight from Chicago. Its rear hits the street with two storeys of concrete and corrugated metal, set back from the road like the police headquarters of a banana republic. The giant entrance porch cantilevers out towards the Acropolis, screaming the supremacy of Big Modernism over the serene stones of the Acropolis opposite. It is the worst case of architectural egotism, of I can do anything bigger than you.

As if to slam the point home, the excavated streets of old Athens, discovered below, have not been laid out as a public site but consigned to a surreal dungeon beneath the concrete columns and glass pavement of the museum's ground floor. Were this Pompeii, no one would have dared such an outrage. Where there should be elegance and deference, there is all the architecture money could buy.

The foyer is in the air-terminal style beloved of big-time museums – witness the Louvre, Tate Modern or New York's Museum of Modern Art. The first two floors offer a mass of structural space for little content, though the oppression is relieved by the exquisite delicacy of the classical sculptures.

These objects – ethereal maidens with plaited hair, beautifully carved boys, the caryatids of the Erechtheion, a mischievous Silenus – seem to float before the viewer, most of them free of glass and deliciously close to the eye. They suggest that Athens has treasures aplenty, without having to reclaim those lost to other cities. (Indeed, the city's new gallery of Cycladic art is one of the finest archaeological museums I know.)

The museum's undoubted coup, political as much as sculptural, is the top gallery, dedicated to the Parthenon. Fashioned as a pavilion with a surrounding colonnade, its walls are hung with the frieze panels still in Greek hands. Glassed on all four sides, the terraces look out over the roofs of Athens and to the Acropolis above. Here the absence of the London panels is undeniably painful. Their replication with plaster casts makes some amends, but the absence of the end pediments is particularly sad. The political point is made, the visual impact stunning.

While the Greeks win full marks for theatricality, the gallery is not the Parthenon, nor a copy, nor remotely deferential to the original. Architecture and museum technology have combined to dictate a lowering ceiling and heavy steel and concrete frames, overlooked by lighting gantries, window blinds and double glazing.

The whole thing is unremittingly hi-tech, with Tschumi determined to push himself forward as a rival to the builders of the Acropolis. The result is ironic. I find the British Museum's bland and gloomy presentation of the marbles somehow more pristine than these souls lost in a modernist wilderness.

Again I would be more sympathetic to Athens were it not for the continued chaos of the Acropolis itself. In a lifetime of visits, I have never seen it free of builders' yards, now more than ever. It was taken from world view by the archaeological profession in the 1980s and submitted to a protracted torture of poles, planks, cranes, rails and sheds. It seems destined to last for ever. I doubt if readers of this article will be able to photograph the Acropolis free of scaffolding in their lifetimes: I have not.

With the Propylaia also covered in scaffolding and the Erechtheion a half-rebuilt "designer ruin", the Acropolis composition is a monument not to ancient Athens but to the unknown 20th-century archaeologist. It is shocking, as if London were to keep St Paul's and Big Ben in scaffolding in perpetuity.

The squabble has now become messy. The Greeks were foolish this summer to reject the British Museum's half-mooted offer to loan the Elgin marbles back for the opening, on the grounds that acceptance might concede London's title. The Greek point would have been better made had the world seen the marbles united, however briefly, than by this legal nicety.

If I were seeking a compromise, I would return the pediments, which are the most glaring omission from the new museum. I would also return Elgin's filched Erechtheion caryatid. As for the rest of London's hoard, I remain a restitutionist, but less convinced than before. Athens has substituted a bunker for a dream and failed to end the argument.

11 December 2021, The Guardian

Miranda Sawyer reviewing Radio 4’s Vice World News, The Unfiltered History Tour ‘which brings a fresh eye to favourite museum pieces’.

'Remember Radio 4’s The History of the World in 100 Objects, hosted by the former British Museum director Neil MacGregor? This is the flip side. The Unfiltered History Tour wants the British Museum to return certain artefacts (“stolen goods”) to the places they originally came from.' Writes Miranda Sawyer. 

This one was about the Easter Island statues. Islanders Sergio Mata’u Rapu and Tarita Alarcón Rapu, who are working to get Hoa Hakananai’a back. “For us, it’s not just a well-carved rock,” said Tarita. “It’s a living ancestor. Living.” Miranda goes back to listen to  the relevant 100 Objects episode (this Easter Island statue is at No 70). 'The contrast between MacGregor’s lofty, academic approach and the emotion of Sergio and Tarita was stark.'

She concludes: ‘Other episodes discuss the Benin bronzes, the Rosetta stone, and, of course, the Parthenon Marbles. There is much non-romantic true love for them all, and it’s hard to argue that these works should not be returned to where they resonate the most’.

18 December 2021, TA NEA,  Yannis Andritsopoulos, London Correspondent for the Greek daily newspaper

Boris Johnson as student in 1986 wrote that the Parthenon Marbles were pillaged and should be returned to Greece. A position the British PM has recently rejected when Greece requests the reunification of these antiquities, and insisting they were 'legally acquired'.

Boris Johnson’s insistence as Prime Minister that the Parthenon Marbles were legally acquired by Lord Elgin and should remain in the British Museum is a complete reversal of the position he previously held, Greek daily newspaper Ta Nea can exclusively reveal.

In fact, as a university student, Johnson urged the British government to return the artefacts to Greece, arguing that they had been unlawfully removed from the ancient temple in Athens.

It is the first time evidence has emerged that the British Prime Minister advocated the reunification of the 2,500-year-old sculptures, a request he has repeatedly rejected publicly in recent years.

In an article written in April 1986 for the Oxford Union’s magazine, Johnson, then an undergraduate at Oxford University, accused Lord Elgin of ‘wholesale pillage’ of the Parthenon.

As British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Elgin removed the sculptures from the Parthenon in the early 19th century, when Greece was under Ottoman rule. He then sold them to the British government which passed them on to the British Museum in 1817.

Writing as president of the Oxford Union 35 years ago, Johnson claimed in his article that an Act of Parliament to hand the Marbles back “could be passed in an afternoon.”

The future Prime Minister went on to accuse the British government of ‘sophistry and intransigence’, saying that Whitehall’s claim that the ‘transaction had been conducted with the recognised legitimate authorities of the time’ is “invalid”.

“A letter from Elgin of 1811 reveals that the Turkish authorities denied ‘that the persons who had sold those marbles to him had any right to dispose of them’,” Johnson wrote.

He added that Elgin “secured from the Sultan a firman to remove 'qualche pezzi di pietra’ - a few pieces of stone - that happened to be lying about on the Acropolis. Elgin's interpretation of this phrase was liberal to say the least.”

This statement contradicts Johnson’s recent remarks regarding the legality of Elgin’s actions. In an exclusive interviewwith Ta Nea published in March, the British Prime Minister claimed that the Parthenon Marbles “were legally acquired by Lord Elgin under the appropriate laws of the time and have been legally owned by the British Museum’s Trustees since their acquisition.” He stressed that this view is “the UK Government’s firm longstanding position on the sculptures”.

“It seems that Boris Johnson was aware of concrete evidence that Lord Elgin’s actions were unlawful from as early as 1986. This begs the question: did he mislead the public when he recently claimed that the sculptures were legally acquired by Elgin?”, a Greek official told Ta Nea.

It is the first time since its publication in 1986 that this article has been made public.

The Daily Telegraph reported last month that Johnson “wrote an article for a student magazine arguing that (the Marbles) should stay here”. In actual fact, though, it is now clear that he argued the exact opposite.

Titled “Elgin goes to Athens – The President marbles at the Grandeur that was (in) Greece …,” the 978-word article was published in Debate, the official magazine of the Oxford Union Society (Vol. 1, No. 3, Trinity Term 1986, p. 22).

Ta Nea found the an unknown article in an Oxford library last week. It is not available online, nor is there any reference to it in the press or on the Internet. Two Oxford sources confirmed its authenticity.

Greece has repeatedly called for the return of the Parthenon Marbles, arguing that Lord Elgin had not secured permission to remove them from the ancient temple. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Culture Minister Lina Mendoni have said that the sculptures were 'stolen'. In his 1986 article, Mr Johnson appears to accept that view.

However, when he met with his Greek counterpart in Downing Street last month, the British leader rebuffed Mitsotakis’s request for the Marbles to be returned. He claimed that the issue was "one for the trustees of the British Museum".

This is inconsistent with the view he expressed in his 1986 article, in which he said that it is for the British Parliament to decide the Marbles’ fate.

“In 1816 (Elgin) sold them to the British government for £35,000. Therefore, it would require an Act of Parliament to hand them back. This, needless to say, seems to be a more or less insuperable brake on the process of return - yet it could be passed in an afternoon,” Johnson, who graduated from Balliol College with a BA in Classics, wrote.

The sculptures held in the British Museum make up about half of the 160-metre frieze which adorned the Parthenon, a 5th century BC architectural masterpiece. Most of the other surviving sculptures (around 50 metres) are in Athens.

Britain has repeatedly rejected Greece's request to hold talks on returning the Marbles. Earlier this year, a UNESCO committee said that Greece’s request for the return of the Parthenon Sculptures is “legitimate and rightful,” stressing that “the case has an intergovernmental character and, therefore, the obligation to return the Parthenon Sculptures lies squarely on the UK Government”. It also called on Britain “to reconsider its stand and proceed to a bona fide dialogue with Greece on the matter”.

In his magazine article, Johnson, then 21, called on the UK to return Phidias’s masterpieces to Greece so that they can be “displayed where they belong”.
“The reasons for taking the marbles were good. The reasons for handing them back are better still,” the future Prime Minister and Tory leader stressed.

“They will be housed in a new museum a few hundred yards from the Acropolis. They will be meticulously cared for. They will not, as they were in the British Museum in 1938, be severely damaged by manic washerwomen scrubbing them with copper brushes,” he wrote.

It had been claimed that as a student Johnson was "sympathetic" to the Greek request, but no evidence to support this had been presented until now. All his past public comments express the view that the Marbles should stay in the UK.

In 2014, he criticised George Clooney for suggesting Britain should return the Parthenon marbles to Greece. Johnson said at the time the actor needed his “marbles” restored, claiming Clooney was “advocating nothing less than the Hitlerian agenda for London's cultural treasures”.

In a 2012 letter shared with the Guardiannewspaper, Johnson, then mayor of London, wrote that “in an ideal world, it is of course true that the Parthenon marbles would never have been removed from the Acropolis,” but concluded that if the sculptures were removed from London, it would amount to “grievous and irremediable loss”. Therefore, he added, “I feel that on balance I must defend the interests of London.”

In March, the Prime Minister posed for Ta Nea in his parliamentary office next to a plaster cast bust of his “personal hero”, Pericles. The Athenian statesman is credited with ordering the design and construction of the Parthenon from which Elgin took the marbles.

As president of the Oxford Union, Johnson invited the then Greek Culture Minister Melina Mercouri to participate in a June 1986 debate titled: “[This House believes] that the Elgin Marbles must be returned to Athens.” She won the vote.
The Greek government says that the sculptures were illegally removed during the Ottoman occupation of Greece in the early 1800s.

It seems Greece has found an unlikely ally in its quest to reunite the Marbles in the form of the 21-year-old Johnson, who thought that “the Elgin Marbles should leave this northern whisky-drinking guilt-culture” and be displayed “where they belong: in a country of bright sunlight and the landscape of Achilles, 'the shadowy mountains and the echoing sea'.”

Boris Johnson’s article in full:

Elgin goes to Athens

The President marbles at the Grandeur that was (in) Greece …

On Thursday 12 June Melina Mercouri, the Greek Minister of Culture, is coming to the Oxford Union. Her subject, thanks to dynamic lobbying has a ring of familiarity all around the world: the return of the Elgin Marbles. Powerful forces will cause her to fly to Britain. They are on the one hand the passionate national feeling of the Greek people, and on the other the sophistry and intransigence of the British Government. And caught between these forces is, not a sack of old balls, but the supreme artistic treasure of the ancient world. The debate on 12 June will mark the climax of a renewed campaign by the Greek government to restore to Greece the sculptural embodiment of the spirit of the nation. The vote in Oxford - the centre of British Classical scholarship - will without question affect the decision in Whitehall. To put it crudely, your choice will count.

The background
In 450 BC Pericles, the ruler who steered Athens to her greatness, launched an ambitious programme of monumental public works. The Acropolis, the ancient citadel of Athens, was to become the glory and envy of the world. Puritan spirits objected, claiming that he was wrongfully using tribute from Athenian dependencies to ‘tart up the city like a whore'. But posterity has faulted their judgement. The craftsmen Phidias, Ictinus and Callicrates, with the personal encouragement of Pericles, created buildings and sculpture which are wholly emblematic of the pride and intellectual vigour of Athens. It is on the Panathenaic frieze, which ran along the wall behind the Parthenon's columns, that we see classical art at its most sublime. The technical control is minute, the features calm and passionless. The detachment and self-control of the figures are in harmony with the Periclean vision: of the city and citizens of the virgin goddess independent, self-reliant, and superior to the common calls of the flesh. The Panathenaic Frieze consisted of 111 panels. 97 survive. 56 of them are in the British Museum.

The Parthenon, the temple of Athena the Virgin, has suffered two major catastrophes in its history. The first was in 1678, when a cunning Turkish general, under siege from the Venetians, decided to use it as a munitions dump - like hiding a tank in a Red Cross tent. But the Venetian general Morosini reached for his gun, like Goering, at the mention of culture, shelled it, and blew up most of the central portion. The second major catastrophe was the wholesale pillage of the ancient shrine by Lord Elgin from 1801 to 1811.

Greece was at this time a tumbledown outpost of the Ottoman Empire. The national identity which Pericles glimpsed, and which has returned so conspicuously in the 20th century, had shimmered and vanished. Lord Elgin was Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, and had left behind him in England a young and skittish wife, with a pampered girl's insatiable desire for presents. It was in the Acropolis that he realised he had found a few things that might amuse here. Manipulating Turkish dependence in Britain for military support, he secured from the Sultan a firman to remove 'qualche pezzi di pietra’ - a few pieces of stone - that happened to be lying about on the Acropolis. Elgin's interpretation of this phrase was liberal to say the least. For ten years a team of labourers, under the direction of a rapacious Italian called Lusieri, sawed and hacked at the sculptures of Phidias. Huge ox-wagons daily lumbered down to the Piraeus laden with their pathetic cargo: Hermes’ Knee is still in Athens. The rest of him is in the British Museum.

It was the near-anarchy of the Ottoman Empire that allowed Elgin to get away with it. ‘Do you mind if I borrow these bits of stone for a while?’ was how he might have put it to the local sergeant, and the man would have shrugged and returned to his harem in the Erechtheum. And yet it was on precisely this point that the Whiteheall mandarins rejected, in 1983, the formal request of the Greek government for the return of the marbles: that ‘transaction had been conducted with the recognised legitimate authorities of the time.’ As it turns out, even this paltry defence is invalid: a letter from Elgin of 1811 reveals that the Turkish authorities denied ‘that the persons who had sold those marbles to him had any right to dispose of them.’

To be fair, Elgin did humanity a service by bagging the sculptures before they could be quarried for the construction of Turkish hovels. He lost a fortune on the enterprise, and his wife, who probably found them too cold and immodest, was not happy with them either. In 1816 he sold them to the British government for £35,000. Therefore it would require an Act of Parliament to hand them back. This, needless to say, seems to be a more or less insuperable brake on the process of return - yet it could be passed in an afternoon. The reasons for taking the marbles were good. The reasons for handing them back are better still.

The Elgin Marbles should leave this northern whisky-drinking guilt-culture, and be displayed where they belong: in a country of bright sunlight and the landscape of Achilles, 'the shadowy mountains and the echoing sea'. They will be housed in a new museum a few hundred yards from the Acropolis. They will be meticulously cared for. They will not, as they were in the British Museum in 1938, be severely damaged by manic washerwomen scrubbing them with copper brushes. Legend tells that the statues of the gods shrieked as they were torn from the Parthenon. It is now almost two centuries since Lord Elgin's deed, and the gods are not mocked.

Boris Johnson
Balliol

1986

 Guardian 18 December 2021

Helena Smith writes: 'The extent of Boris Johnson’s U-turn on the Parthenon marbles has been laid bare in a 1986 article unearthed in an Oxford library in which the then classics student argued passionately for their return to Athens.

Deploying language that would make campaigners proud, Johnson not only believed the fifth century BC antiquities should be displayed “where they belong”, but deplored how they had been “sawed and hacked” from the magisterial edifice they once adorned.

“The Elgin marbles should leave this northern whisky-drinking guilt-culture, and be displayed where they belong: in a country of bright sunshine and the landscape of Achilles, ‘the shadowy mountains and the echoing sea,’” he wrote in the article, republished by the Greek daily, Ta Nea, on Saturday.'

To read the article in full, follow the link here

Telegraph 18 December 2021

Steve Bird also took up the story: 'Thirty-five years ago, Johnson wrote how the UK’s claim to the artefacts relied on the “invalid” suggestion that Elgin had received the approval to remove them from “the legitimate authorities of the time”.

Johnson wrote: “As it turns out, even this paltry defence is invalid: a letter from Elgin of 1811 reveals that the Turkish authorities denied ‘that the persons who had sold those marbles to him had any right to dispose of them.’”

Greece has repeatedly insisted that because the Ottomans were an occupying force in Greece they had no right to sanction the removal of the frieze to anyone.

To read the Telgraph article, follow the link here(there is a paywall).