Pope Francis has decided to return to Greece the three marble fragments of the Parthenon that have been preserved for centuries in the Vatican Museums.
As reported by the Holy See through a statement, the Argentine Pontiff will "donate" them to the Archbishop of Athens and head of the Greek Orthodox Church, Jerome II, as a sign of his "sincere desire to continue the ecumenical path" with this branch of Christianity.
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The #MeToo of the restitution of looted art
The three Pentelenic marble fragments in question, worked by Phidias, the most famous sculptor of Ancient Greece, arrived at the Vatican Museums in the 19th century.
They come from the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon, which was built on the Acropolis of Athens in the 5th century BC and which has been looted on numerous occasions throughout history.
A few months ago, Sicily already returned a fragment of the Parthenon frieze to Athens, in exchange for an important headless statue of Athena, from the end of the 5th century BC.
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The Vatican has become the last Western state to return its pieces of the Parthenon marbles, long claimed by Greece, which denounces looting.
In fact, Athens built a new Acropolis Museum in 2009 to demonstrate that it has a suitable place to house the archaeological treasure.
In the statement, the Holy See emphasizes, albeit briefly, as usual, that it is a religiously inspired donation to the Orthodox Church, by the will of the Pope.
It is not, technically, a bilateral agreement between the two states to return the fragments that are kept in the Vatican.
It is likely that they wanted to emphasize the religious dimension of this return to avoid creating a precedent that could affect other priceless pieces that are part of the vast collection of the Vatican Museums.
In 2007, in the time of Benedict XVI, the Vatican denied the return of these three vestiges, which reached its funds two centuries ago after a series of sales operations, but one was lent to the Hellenic authorities for an exhibition in 2015.
Pope Francis and the patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, Jerome II, in Athens in December 2021. George Vitsaras (AP)
Pope Francis visited Greece a year ago and there he met Patriarch Jerome II, in an unusual meeting, since in the past Rome has always had many disagreements with the Greek Orthodox Church.
Among other things, the Orthodox blame the Vatican and the Crusaders for the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Bergoglio intends to resume good relations with this branch of Christianity and during his visit he launched a message of peace and brotherhood with the Greek patriarch, which he now deals with to reinforce with this gesture.
The sculptures in question are the remains of a frieze about 160 meters long that surrounded the outer wall of the Parthenon, a temple dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom.
The Parthenon was built between 447 and 432 BC, at the height of the golden age of Hellenic culture, by order of the influential Pericles and is considered the masterpiece of classical architecture.
The frieze represented a procession in honor of Athena.
One of the pieces, the horse's head, comes from the western pediment of the building, in which the mythological struggle for dominance of the Greek region of Attica between the goddess of wisdom, Athena, and the god of the oceans, Poseidon, was represented. .
Specifically, the animal was part of the figure of the chariot of the warrior goddess and protector of the city.
Piece of the head of one of the children in charge of the offerings in the temple. HANDOUT (AFP)
The other two marbles symbolize the head of one of the children in charge of the offerings in the temple and that of a bearded man who was part of the figuration of the Centauromachy myth, which recounts, in the southern metopes of the Parthenon, the fight between the centaurs and the lapitas.
Marble that symbolizes the head of a man with a beard and that was part of the figuration of the myth of Centauromachy.HANDOUT (AFP)
Some small fragments, and other sculptures from the temple, are in other European galleries.
The Vatican return occurs at a time when the debate on the decolonization of European museums is once again hot.
Among those who refuse to return the looted works, the British Museum in London stands out.
Most of the Parthenon's decoration was lost in a bombing raid in the 17th century and about half of the surviving works were carried off in the early 19th century by a British diplomat, Thomas Bruce Elgin, “Lord Elgin”.
The then ambassador of the British Empire to the Ottoman Empire, under whose domain Athens was, used special saws and other heavy machinery to extract many of the metopes and their bas-reliefs from the frieze, as can be deduced from the correspondence between Elgin and Giovanni Battista Lusieri, the Italian painter who supervised all the removal of the works in 1801. In 1816, broke, Elgin sold the pieces to the British Museum for 350,000 pounds (310,000 euros) at the time.
The controversy between London and Athens has been open for some time.
It began in the early 1980s, when the actress and Greek Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri, who was very popular at the time in the UK, launched a campaign for the return of the sculptures.
She claimed that the transfer of the reliefs was not legal because, although Elgin paid for the pieces, she did so to the Turkish authorities that were occupying Greece, without the Greek people being able to give their opinion on the matter.
In recent years, the Hellenic government has strengthened this campaign, which has a great emotional charge for Greek citizens.
