Yannis Andritsopoulos, London Correspondent for Ta Nea, Greece's daily newspaper reporting on yesterday's peaceful protest at the British Museum.

The first-ever ‘protest concert’ held in the British Museum’s Duveen Gallery took place in London yesterday, Thursday 20 June 2019. This also marked the Acropolis Museum’s 10th anniversary with singer and songwriter Hellena performing her song for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles.

This peaceful protest took place in the British Museum’s Parthenon Gallery. Hellena sang '‘The Parthenon Marbles (bring them back)', which she has written in support of the campaign for the return of the Parthenon Marbles. The song was performed, a capella, 10 times – once for every anniversary year of the Acropolis Museum.

“I wanted the Museum’s visitors to learn the truth and those who run the Museum to understand that there is no way we can stop asking for the Parthenon Marbles to be returned,” Hellena told Ta Nea, Greece’s daily newspaper. “I am very proud of this song, which fully reflects my beliefs and feelings, but also the feelings of millions of people all over the world.”

Hellena’s song was released yesterday, 20 June 2019, to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Acropolis Museum – where she believes the marbles should be housed once they are returned to Greece. The song will be used by organisations around the world to “raise awareness of an injustice dating back over 200 years.”

The protest was held in collaboration with the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM) and the International Organising Committee - Australia - for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles.

“Hellena is a beautiful and talented singer and songwriter, whose soul has connected to the plight of the surviving and fragmented Parthenon Marbles. A 200 years old request and yet for young people today, it is a new call, perhaps just 10 years old, the anniversary of the superlative Acropolis Museum,” Marlen Godwin, BCRPM’s spokesperson, told Ta Nea.

“For all generations the art of music brings hope and it is hope that will keep this cause alive forever. We thank Hellena for her song and look to the day when music may change the plight of these sculptures for millions to appreciate what the ancients hoped we’d understand and what one, very special museum can do to show respect for an equally special museum, a home to a Parthenon Gallery where this peerless collection is exhibited the right way around, in context and with views to the Parthenon, which still stands. As generation Z look to visit museums for physical spaces they can invest in, communities they can engage with and belong to, it is time for the British Museum to look for other exemplars for Room 18 and allow the sculptures from the Parthenon still in London to re-join their halves in Athens,” she added.

On 7 June 1816, British Parliament voted to purchase from Lord Elgin his collection of sculpted marbles from the Parthenon and elsewhere on the Acropolis of Athens.Despite repeated requests from Greece and elsewhere to find a way to reunite them, these have remained in the British Museum.

On 20 June 2009, the Acropolis Museum in Athens was opened to the public. Since it opened it has welcomed over 14 million visitors from all over the world. The missing sculptures, those still in the UK, are exhibited as casts.

This news report was published in Ta Nea, Greece’s daily newspaper (www.tanea.gr) on 21 June 2019 and to read the Greek version of this article, please click here.

To hear Hellena's song, click here.

Helen Glynn, from BP or not BP? said:

‘The Troy exhibition has inspired us to create this magnificent beast, because the Trojan Horse is the perfect metaphor for BP sponsorship. On its surface the sponsorship looks like a generous gift, but inside lurks death and destruction. This is our 40th performance intervention at the British Museum: for eight years our peaceful creative protests have been dismissed and the museum has continued to back BP. Now the planet is literally burning. So we invite everyone to come along to our mass action tomorrow and make sure the museum can no longer ignore the fact that, in order to have a liveable planet, BP Must Fall.’

Those that gathered on Saturday 08 February 2020 to support the activists and the performers, were all targeting BP’s sponsorship of the museum’s current Troy: Myth and Reality exhibition.

Multiple groups from around the world came together in the museum to make the links between climate change, fossil fuel extraction, colonialism, human rights abuses and workers’ rights, using the museum as a backdrop for calls for justice and decolonisation and reimagining what a truly enlightened, responsible and engaged British Museum could look like.

Room 18, The Parthenon Galleries was no exception. Groups gathered to hear Danny Chivers of BP or not BP? helped by Marlen Godwin of the BCRPM, to explain the connection of Saturday's protest againt BP sponsorship of exhibitions at the British Museum, with the unfair 200 year plus division of the Parthenon Marbles. The peerless collection of the sculptures from the Parthenon are mainly exhibited between the British Museum in London and the Acropolis Museum in Athens.

BCRPM has been campaigning for the return of the sculptures from London to Athens, since 1983. The 'new' Acropolis Museum was officially opened in June 2009, picking up an award in London in November 2010. In June 2019, it celebrated it's 10th anniversary and BCRPM helped Hellena Micy sing her song for the Parthenon Marbles in Room 18. Hellena sang  her song 10 times, once for every year that the museum in Athens has welcomed visitors from all over the world. To listen to Hellena's song, please follow the link here.

2020 is also Melina Mercouri year. With that in mind, BCRPM had t-shirts printed for the day and included in the presentations in Room 18 the background to Melina's pleas for the return of the sculptures. We would like to thank the Melina Mercouri Foundation for their kind permission to use the image of Melina on the t-shirt. If you would like to order one, kindly email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Celebrating the activist Melina Mercouri, who had championed for all freedoms, from the freedom of speech and to more, BCRPM also remembered their Chair, Dame Janet Suzman when she had campaigned and protested against  aparththeid in South Africa. These two activist women share a great deal, from acting to their passionate protests, to their love for the Parthenon and its sculptures. To this day Janet continues to be enthusiastic about protests in the BM, so much so that in 2018, she wrote words that Danny Chivers read out in Room 18.

In 2019 at another BP or not BP? protest, Cambridge University stdent Petros Papadopoulos also quoted Janet during his passionate plea for the 'RETURN' of the marbles to Athens.

 And so to the protest on 08 February 2020, Janet's words were heard in Room 18 once again: 

These unmatched sculptures that you see before you have a home waiting for them. These figures, part of an ancient belief system, have been stranded in the grandest refugee centre you’ve ever seen - the great British Museum itself. But home is where they were created two and a half thousand years ago.

In Athens stands a fine building especially built to house them, and this year in June, the New Acropolis Museum will celebrate its eleventh anniversary. On its top floor there are yearning gaps where these very sculptures should be sitting, joined with the other half of the pedimental carvings and in direct sight of the ancient building from which they were chopped, and which, astonishingly, still stands proud on its ancient rock. That fact alone makes these sculptures unique; we can still see exactly where they first displayed themselves, for they were never intended as separate 'works of art', but as part of the mighty whole of Athena’s glorious temple. Who, one wonders, was a mere occupying Sultan to sign away the genius of Periclean Athens?

Now is the time to do the right thing. SIMPLE JUSTICE DEMANDS IT! GO BM! Do it! 

The protest was also covered in Ta Nea with an article by Yannis Andritsopoulos, UK Correspondent for Ta Nea, based in London.