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The United Kingdom irritates Greece by claiming that it collected the Parthenon marbles from the ruins

2022-05-24T15:53:58.193Z


The Johnson Government washes its hands again and ensures that the sculptures were legally acquired by the British Museum


The worst way to channel a discussion as passionate and close to the skin as the return to Athens of the Parthenon statues, exhibited by the British Museum in London, is to use the "experts" as witnesses.

The condescending tone used last week by Jonathan Williams, the museum's deputy director, at the meeting in Paris of Unesco (the UN body dedicated to education, science and culture) that debated the return of the marbles has unleashed the wrath of the Greek authorities.

More information

The endless story of the Parthenon statues: Boris Johnson will not return them to Greece either

"Most of the frieze was collected from the ruins that surrounded the Parthenon," Williams assured members of the intergovernmental commission that debates and promotes the return of cultural property to its place of origin.

“All these objects were not removed from the building as has been suggested”, tried to refute the person in charge of the museum.

He crowned the task with a paternalistic consolation addressed to his Greek colleagues: "That magical moment of the reunification of the sculptures will never occur, because half of them were lost forever over a period of more than 2,500 years," he said. Williams.

It was the way to reject the real possibility of a return with the excuse that the building will never recover its original splendor.

And although it is true that, during centuries of wars and invasions, the building went from being a Greek temple to a Christian church, a Muslim mosque and even a military barracks half destroyed by an explosion in the 17th century, the statement that Thomas Bruce Elgin "Lord Elgin" picked up most of the statues now on display in Room 18 of the British Museum from the ground has been widely disputed.

The then ambassador of the Empire to the Ottoman Empire, under whose dominions Athens was, allowed the use of special saws and other heavy machinery in order to remove many of the metopes and their bas-reliefs from the frieze.

This is deduced from the correspondence between Elgin and Giovanni Battista Lusieri, the Italian painter who supervised all these tasks in 1801. In 1816, bankrupt, Elgin sold them to the British Museum for 350.

"To reduce the total transport letter, Lusieri cut the back of most of these blocks and discarded it, but kept the face that the sculptures were on intact," said Professor Anthony Snodgrass, Professor of Classical Archaeology. Cambridge University, and a member of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles.

“This is not to say that all the blocks were torn from the top of the temple, but the state of preservation of most of the blocks on display in the British Museum is good enough to show that they did not fall from a height of twelve feet. meters, but they were carefully uprooted and lowered, to saw their backs into the ground, ”said Snodgrass.

In recent years, the Government of Athens has reinforced a campaign that the actress and Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri, began in the early 1980s, and which has an enormous emotional burden for Greek citizens.

In November last year, the Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, visited London, and cunningly appealed to the

Global Britain

that Boris Johnson dreamed of for the post-Brexit time.

What better gesture to inaugurate this new era of international relations than the generous return of the marbles?

Much more if you take into account that Johnson is a lover of classical Greece, which he boasts of reciting the first hundred lines of the

Odyssey by heart.

Or that, as president of the Oxford Union university debate club, in 1986 he invited Melina Mercouri, the Greek actress, singer and Minister of Culture who championed the campaign for the return of the sculptures.

And that, even as mayor of London, he came to defend in a letter to the Greek authorities, in 2012, that "in an ideal world, the Parthenon marbles should never have been removed from the Acropolis."

Realpolitik

took hold the

moment Johnson became prime minister, and Downing Street referred the matter to the trustees of the British Museum, who "operate independently from the government," as a government spokesman said.

Those responsible for the museum do not even want to hear about a possible return.

They consider that the marbles were acquired legally, at a time when the Republic of Greece that today claims them did not even exist.

However, popular support for restitution, particularly within the UK, is huge and growing.

According to the most recent

YouGov survey

, on November 23, 59% of the British believe that the sculptures should be on the Acropolis.

And only 18% are against it.

The rest, directly, have no opinion on the matter.

Aware of the good management of the current Acropolis Museum in Athens, where the statues could end up in case of return, the managers of the Briton suggest the trap of a loan of the works.

They know that the offer puts the Greek government in a difficult position.

To accept something like this would be to implicitly admit that the property belongs to another.

Even the words are loaded with intent.

That is why there is still a sector of the British press that speaks of the “Elgin marbles”, and not of the “Parthenon marbles”.

And the correspondent of EL PAÍS once suggested to the current director of the museum, the German Hartwig Fischer, that current 3-D copying techniques made it possible to reproduce works of art with complete accuracy.

“That would be a solution.

And send the copies to Athens,” he replied.







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Source: elparis

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