23 May 2022, London, Thanasis Gavos for Skaigr
"Great shock" said Michael Wood, a renown British historian as he grappled with the "false" claim of the British Museum that most of the Parthenon Sculptures located in London were collected by Lord Elgin's associates not from the monument, but "from the rubble".
This argument was made by the Deputy Director of the British Museum Jonathan Williams at UNESCO's the intergovernmental commission's 23 session on the Promotion of the Return of Cultural Property last week in Paris.
Speaking to SKAI Mr. Wood, Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester and one of the newest members of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM), clarified: "It is clearly clear that most of the marbles that Elgin took were taken from the monument. You cannot tour the British Museum today looking at them and thinking that these marbles fell from 40 feet in the rubble. The greatest of the damage they suffered was in their removal by Elgin and his envoy, the Italian Lusieri."
The professor known through television histories to the British professor continued: "We have eyewitnesses who describe the forcible removal of the foreheads, the frieze. Even Lusieri himself admitted that he had to resort to becoming a 'little barbarian', as he put it, to get the pieces of the frieze, cutting the back with saws to make them lighter to be transported. So it is outrageous to claim that most of the sculptures were not on the monument."
Mr Williams' argument provoked a reaction from Culture Minister Lina Mendoni, who in a statement to the Guardian newspaper referred, among other things, to the "blatant theft" by Elgin.
The honorary President of the BCRPM Professor Anthony Snowgrass commented speaking to SKAI that the argument for rescuing sculptures from the rubble is not entirely new, but has now been formulated to an exaggerated degree. In any case, he added, it does not change the substance of the issue and the Greek request.
On the British Museum's argument for the legal acquisition of the Sculptures, which Mr. Williams insisted on at the UNESCO conference, Michael Wood noted: "In the year 2022 such arguments do not convince most people at all. Whether they were acquired legally is a very controversial point, there is very little evidence of this. In any case, how can he (Elgin) legally acquire them from an occupying power?
"The question on which we should keep our minds is not these meticulous arguments about whether it was legal, whether this sculpture was on the ground or not, but what is the right thing to do in this case. All over the world now these demands for reparations and for the repatriation of things looted by European powers in the era of imperialism are becoming a very big issue. The time has now come for these Sculptures to be reunited in the Acropolis Museum."
At the same time, Mr. Wood highlighted the importance of the moral argument about a single artistic creation that must be united to the greatest extent possible. "There are also fragments in the Vatican, in the Louvre, in Copenhagen, in Würzburg. Everything should be returned to Athens and the Marbles should be reunited.
As for the British Museum, he stressed that it could replace the Parthenon Sculptures with other "fascinating" masterpieces offered by the Greek government.
"Moreover, the return of the Parthenon Marbles would be a great, magnanimous gesture from the British to the Greeks, which most Britons support, according to the polls," Michael Wood concluded.
Source: skai.gr
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