Greece is making a play for all the Parthenon marbles – if the British Museum will play along

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The Acropolis Museum in Athens is an exercise in optimism on a national scale. It was built largely to house the Parthenon marbles and other artifacts of the cradle of democracy. Not just some of the marbles – all of them, especially the ones in the British Museum.

About half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures are in the British Museum, the other half are in the Acropolis Museum, which opened in 2009. A few fragments, most of them small, are scattered across Europe.

The Acropolis Museum exists to reunite the marbles. Its general director, Crete-born archaeologist Nikolaos Stampolidis, at the age of 70, has made the repatriation of those in London his final mission – an act that, if successful, would make him a Greek patriot on a heroic scale.

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There is some chance his mission will succeed. The British Museum and the British government are under pressure like never before to deliver the marbles, which were stripped from the Acropolis in the early 1800s, to Athens. Even Pope Francis has sided with the Greeks.

“This is for humanity, for the marbles to be united again,” Mr. Stampolidis said as he toured the third-floor gallery of the Acropolis Museum, where 40 of the 97 surviving blocks of the Parthenon’s frieze are on display. “I am looking at them as the symbol of our democracy, of the Western world’s humanity. How do we dare have the marbles split in our common ancestral home?”

The Acropolis Museum is a work in progress. The missing pieces – among them 15 Parthenon metopes (rectangular slabs) and 19 figures from the temple’s pediments, all of them in London – exist there as plaster casts. They are easy to spot, since they are chalk white, whereas the originals have a pleasing tan patina, as if smeared with a thin layer of honey. Mr. Stampolidis, the Greek government, the Greek population and the majority of British people hope to see the jarring fake pieces replaced with the London ones soon. (A recent YouGov poll found that 53 per cent of Britons want the marbles returned.)

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The tortuous high-level political and diplomatic process to send the marbles home could take years – or not happen at all. In March, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the British Museum’s marbles are staying put. “We share their treasures with the world, and the world comes to the U.K. to see them,” he told reporters. “The collection of the British Museum is protected by law, and we have no plans to change it.”

Of course, he would have to say that, since the British Museum Act, passed by Parliament in 1963, seems airtight. It prohibits the museum from selling or handing over any of its holdings, not just the Parthenon marbles, except in highly unusual circumstances, such as clear evidence that an artifact was acquired illegally (for example, art stolen by the Nazis). How much longer the legislation can hold is an open question. A win in the next election by the Labour Party could see the law rewritten, since some senior party members have called for repatriation. And Greece is arguing that the marbles that found their way to London were looted.

Mr. Stampolidis’s campaign has formidable allies. They include Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the prime minister who won the May 21 election and will almost certainly win the runoff poll on June 25 (he is out of office until then); an array of celebrities, including Britain’s Stephen Fry, who have given impassioned speeches about the need for the marbles to be reunited on ethical and historical grounds; the Italian and Sicilian governments; UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural agency; and Pope Francis.

“Greece’s constant demand for the reunification of the stolen Parthenon Sculptures with the mutilated monument, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is a unique case based on respect for cultural identity and the principle of preserving the integrity of world heritage sites,” said Sophia Hiniadou Cambanis, an Athens attorney who is the cultural policy and management adviser to the Greek parliament. “It is self evident that Greece does not recognize the British Museum’s ownership and possession of the Sculptures.”

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Greece has formally been lobbying for the repatriation of the Parthenon marbles since 1983, when Melina Mercouri, an actor, singer and Greece’s minister of culture in the 1980s (she died in 1994) pleaded for their return, doing so eloquently and forcibly. “You must understand what the marbles of the Parthenon mean to us Greeks,” she told the Oxford Union student society in 1986. “It is our pride, it is our sacrifices. It is the noblest symbol of perfection. It is a tribute to democratic philosophy. They are our ambitions and our very name. It is the essence of Greekness.”

Among the gallery of rogues in Greek history, few stand out more than Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, who was appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1798 and evidently had little respect for Greekness. Three years later, when Greece was under Ottoman occupation (the first Hellenic Republic was proclaimed in 1822), he began removing the sculptural wonders of the Parthenon, doing a lot of damage to the building in the process, and transporting them to London. Since then, most Britons have known the Parthenon marbles as the Elgin marbles.

Ms. Hiniadou Cambanis said that Elgin never had authority from the Ottoman sultan to saw off parts of the Parthenon. She said he relied on a letter from the Turkish officer that allowed Elgin’s men only to make drawings of the Parthenon and take casts of its sculptures. The British Museum has stated the opposite: That Elgin acted with the permission of legal authorities in Athens and London and that a parliamentary committee in 1816 found nothing amiss, which is why Parliament allocated funds to purchase the marbles from Elgin.

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Whatever the case, the marbles lived a quiet life in the British Museum for two almost centuries. The peace began to crack in 2006, when Germany’s Heidelberg University returned a fragment from the Parthenon’s northern frieze, marking the first repatriation. The university’s then vice-rector, Angelos Chaniotis, said the decision was “guided by the scholarly aim of promoting the unification of the Parthenon as a unique moment of world culture.”

A momentous move took place in 2021, when UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property voted to include the possible return of the marbles in its key decision document for the first time. It said Greece’s request was “legitimate and rightful,” and called on Britain, “to reconsider its stand and proceed to a bona fide dialogue with Greece on this matter,” adding the “obligation to return the Parthenon sculptures lies squarely with the U.K. government,” not the British Museum.

At that point, momentum began to build for further repatriations. In early 2022, the Antonio Salinas Regional Archeological Museum in Palermo, Sicily, sent the “Fagan fragment,” representing Artemis, goddess of the hunt, to the Acropolis Museum as a permanent “deposit.” The Italian Ministry of Culture approved the repatriation and, a year ago, the fragment was attached to the frieze in the Acropolis Museum.

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For Greece, the best was yet to come. In March, the Acropolis Museum received three pieces from the Vatican Museums, including the head of a horse pulling the goddess Athena’s chariot.

There were no legal issues related to the repatriation, or any state-to-state or museum-to-museum negotiations. The Vatican City is a sovereign country and Pope Francis is its supreme ruler. The pieces were simply donated by him to the Archbishop of the Orthodox Church in Athens, who in turn gave them to the museum as a gift.

“We did not give the Vatican anything in return,” Mr. Stampolidis said. “It was a gesture from the Pope himself declaring that he is in support of the ecumenical truth that these pieces belong to the monument itself.”

Neither the British Museum nor the British government have been immune to the Greek demands to reunite the marbles. Secret negotiations between the Greek government, led by Mr. Mitsotakis, and the British Museum to find resolution began in 2020. A year later, Mr. Mitsotakis met with George Osborne, the former chancellor of the exchequer who is chairman of the British Museum.

Various ideas have been floated, including a “loan” of the marbles to Greece, possibly in exchange for Greek art treasures lent to the British Museum, and establishing an “outpost” of the British Museum at the Acropolis Museum. The British Museum has said it would consider a loan as long as “the borrowing institution acknowledges the British Museum’s ownership of the object.”

That’s a non-starter with the Greek government and the Acropolis Museum. “How can I accept a loan of pieces that belong to the monument?” Mr. Stambolidis said.

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Last month, Mr. Mitsotakis said that his government was exploring a “win-win” solution but ruled out a compromise in which the British Museum retains legal ownership.

The mere fact that both sides are talking as international pressure mounts is seen as a sign that a breakthrough of some sort is possible, even if one does not seem imminent. Mr. Mitsotakis told the Associated Press in May that, after the election, “I’m looking to pick up again the momentum and build upon the progress that we have made.”

The term “progress” gives Greeks some hope that a resolution will eventually be found to release what Ms. Hiniadou Cambanis called “marbles that were kidnapped and taken to a British prison.”

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