02/01/2024 10:18
Culture Minister Lina Mendoni, who has said the Parthenon Marbles kept in the British Museum for 200 years were stolen, said Greece nonetheless is willing to lend the institution valuable artifacts to have the marbles returned.
It wasn’t clear if that would be permanent or a loan of the type that Museum Chairman George Osborne has offered, with the idea of a “reunification” bandied about and Greek artifacts held in the museum until the marbles are sent back.
Speaking to the British newspaper The Guardian Lina Mendoni promised that the London institution’s revered Greek galleries would never go empty.
“Our position is clear,” she said. “Should the sculptures be reunited in Athens, Greece is prepared to organize rotating exhibitions of important antiquities that would fill the void.”
Asked if particular works had been requested by London, the minister – a classical archaeologist by training – insisted continuing discussions had not extended to “specific artifacts,” the paper said.
“(They) would fill the void, maintain, and constantly renew, international visitor interest in the Greek galleries of the British Museum,” Mendoni said, though she cautioned that “any agreement and all its particulars, would have to be in accordance with the Greek law on cultural heritage,” without clarification.
Osborne and British officials have said Greece would have to give up ownership to the marbles that were ripped off the Parthenon in the early 19th Century by a Scottish diplomat, Lord Elgin, who later sold them to the museum.
He said he had the permission of the then-ruling Ottoman Empire – which didn’t own them – and the British Museum has cited that as evidence it is now the real owner of the marbles created in Greece 2500 years ago.
The newspaper said a coveted item is especially Agamemnon’s Mask, the gold funerary masks historians call the “Mona Lisa of prehistory” that could be sent to the British museum as a crowd-attracter.
“We want to create a proper partnership,” Osborne told British lawmakers on the Culture, Media and Sport committee in October, “that would mean objects from Greece coming here, objects that have potentially never left Greece before and certainly never been seen before, and objects from the Parthenon collection potentially traveling to Greece.”
Talks aimed at securing a loan deal would continue, he pledged, despite the diplomatic fallout when British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak earlier refused to meet Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis who was in London.
The British Museum’s collection incorporates nearly half the 160-meter-long (525 feet) Parthenon frieze depicting the procession to the temple of the Panathenaic festival in honor of the warrior goddess Athena, as well as 15 sculpted panels and 17 pedimental figures that were part of its unique decoration.
Mendoni said Greece wouldn’t accede to a loan or giving up ownership and it’s unclear what form this new deal would take. “The Parthenon, a World Heritage monument, with its universal importance … demands its integrity in the place [where the sculptures were carved] and for the reasons that created it.”
She denied that the idea of establishing a branch of the British Museum at the Acropolis museum, purpose-built to display the statues, was back on the cards. “There’s been no such discussion,” she said.
Asked if Greece had ruled out taking legal action against the British Museum, Mendoni said the government would continue “to make full use of the possibilities offered by dialogue and cultural diplomacy”.
“Even people who for years have opposed the return of the sculptures to Greece now support our demand,” she said. “If I was not optimistic, I would not work with fervor and faith for the national cause of reuniting the sculptures in the Acropolis Museum here in Athens.”
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