Romancing the Stones

New Museum in Athens Designed in part to ???Guilt??? Britain into returning the Elgin Marbles. See blog: http://tiny.cc/UHbdV

Of course the marbles, really, belong to everyone.
But why does belonging to everyone has to be necessarily associated with London?
"Everyone" is equally free and welcomed to travel to Athens, see this work of art united, non mutilated and with visual contact to their original context, which is the Parthenon.

Lord Byron in his narative poem Childe Harold???s Pilgrimage, part of which was written when visiting Athens soon after the ???removal??? of the Parthenon sculptures by Lord Elgin, provides an accurate account. Here are a couple of excerpts:

But who, of all the plunderers of yon fane
On high, where Pallas linger???d loth to flee
The latest relic of her ancient reign;
The last, the worst, dull spoiler, who was he?

-----------

Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
By British hands, which it had best behoved
To guard those relics ne'er to be restored.
Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,
And once again thy hapless bosom gored,
And snatch'd thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!

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Byron was not the only one in Britain to protest against Elgin???s actions at the time. Sir John Newport added:
"The Honourable Lord has taken advantage of the most unjustifiable means and has committed the most flagrant pillages. It was, it seems, fatal that a representative of our country loot those objects that the Turks and other barbarians had considered sacred," said Sir John Newport

Imagine Britain occupied by the Germans after WWII. Could a Frenchman legitimately remove Britain's national treasures, so authorized by Berlin ? and then, again 'legitimately', sell the lot to the Louvre ?
The Parthenon Marbles are a symbol and relic of british imperialism, of a time that Britain didn't just 'buy' the heritage of enslaved peoples ('name your price!'), but was also arrogant enough to consider itself the sole appropriate keeper and heir of it's spiritual content.

Why can't the marbles belong to everyone in Athens?

I don't get it.

Does everyone only exist in the UK?

The question by zz333 as to if modern Greeks are really offsprings (who can prove/disprove that?) of ancient Greeks is totally irrelevant for the following reason: the debate as to who is the "rightful owners" of the Marbles (i.e. the whole world vs. the Greeks) is misleading.

1. The marbles belong neither to the "whole world" nor to the "Greeks". Both statements are invalid.
2. The marbles are pieces of art.
3. The Parthenon Marbles belong to what their name suggests: they belong to the Parthenon.
4. The marbles are _inseparable_ from the Parthenon. They are inextricable _part_ of the Parthenon.
5. The marbles are not consumer products in order to be viewed in the most busy place on earth.
6. The marbles are not movable items like vessels, pottery products or other ancient valuable artworks.
7. Various movable artworks _can be_ and already _are_ shown in a number of places different to where they were created. No problem with that.

The Parthenon Marbles case is _unique_. Not only because they are a product of theft, not only because they were taken by the authority of an oppressor and not only because there now does exist a musem waiting for them, just 100meters from the Parthenon, that would reastablish the perfect harmony with the place they were built to be in the first place.

It is a unique case because they form an integral part of a special building, of an unprecedented artistic excellence for human being.

For such a unique case, there is no grey area and there is no unanswered argument of the opposite side. It is crystal clear that they should be send back home to the Greeks. Not because they are their "rightful owners" but because fate made the Greeks to be the curators of the Parthenon regardless of the DNA-connection(!) to the ancient Greeks (only a racist would think differently on that).

Romancing the stones?

The article is presenting the case of the PARTHENON marbles in a really lopsided manner and in addition calls them «stones»!
Actually the «taking» of the marbles was an atrocious theft. Because how else do you call the act of removing something from someone who is not «watching»?
Many antiquities were removed due to excavations and discoveries by foreign archaeologists but Lord Elgin did not even contribute to the Parthe non marbles discovery like A. Evans (Knossos) or E. Schliemann, ( Troy, Mycenes) to name a few. It is also known that such removal was not considered as «theft» at the time, definitely not by the Turks that had no sense of ownership. It cannot be called a theft legally either since it was done way before the 1970s when international agreements were established to control ownership of ancient artifacts.
The real problem?: it will create a precedent for other antiquities from other countries as well. And yes, it will have a far reaching effect because France also has stuff that should probably be returned!.

The article perpetrates an argument in favor of the British Museum: the «myth» of them being better off at the Museum, which is just that: a myth!
The British Museum have always claimed that the sculptures were very well cared for. Actually in the 1930s the sculptures were "cleaned" under the wrong belief that they were originally "brilliant white". The so-called cleaning was not the intention of the curators who knew well that the sculptures made out of Pentelicon marble would have acquired a mellow honey colour when exposed to the air. Moreover the sculptures showed clear traces of colour that the scraping destroyed. The cleaning was done at the instruction of Lord Duveen who financed the building of the galleries for exhibiting the Marbles. The cleaning carried out with wire brushes, copper tools and carborundum caused serious and irretrievable damage that was admitted by the authorities of the Museum. However, the British Museum officials kept the full report on the incident carefully under wraps until a Cambridge historian revealed it in his book "Lord Elgin and the Marbles, Oxford University Press, 1998."

So, writing about the PARTHENON marbles, all info should be presented and not only what support the journalist??? s opinion. Personal suggestions are inappropriate!. The situation is complex enough so one should adhere to just presenting the facts and to not state the opinion that these pieces of art and cultural heritage belong to all of Western civilization after all and not to just the contemporary nation of Greece. There is an enormous number of artifacts of Hellenic cultural heritage that already are in other countries and are not expected back. But the Parthenon marbles belong to the building they were made for and where they stood for 1000 years before Elgin liked them so much that he HAD to HAVE them!

I own a car, but I go to jail.
My neighbour who doesn't have a car goes to the jail manager: "I want to buy the machine of George's car"
"Sure, you can have everything you want", he anwers.
I finish my years in jail and go home. I see the machine missing and I somehow find out what happened.
But when I go to talk to him, he answers that he got it after the jail manager's permission and that he owns it now.
After a lot of pressure he gets to the conclusion that my garage is not good and safe enough to secure the machine so he should better keep it until I build a new garage.
I finally build it and it's a masterpiece. Best garage ever. Moreover it is especially built to keep my machine safe. I can now even park the rest of the car inside and maybe fix it (if I can get the front bumper from my cousin in France and some other parts from all over the world).
Oh, but now my neighbour says that he has 3 more car machines in his garage along with mine and lots of his friends go there and admire them free!...

And by the way we don't need any favours. We don't want to lend them for a while. We want back what belongs to this land. We're not going to put them in our houses like Lord Elgin wanted to do. We will put them back where they were, or rather 1000 feet beside their original spot.

So The Parthenon Marbles, now in the British Museum, "Belong to everyone." They would still "belong to everyone" if they were in Athens' new state-of-the-art Acropolis Museum where a world-class exhibition hall waits their return home.

I've been to the British Museum a number of times. Do you know what people say? "The only British thing about the British Musem is its name". Let them keep the rest, let them have some other ancient Greek (Hellenic) items, and send the Parthenon Marbles back to the Parthenon. What a better place for them to be?

Certainly not the British! But they are just as likely to return them to their rightful owner as we are to return this country to its rightful owners (not us).

As Cathleen makes clear in her piece, the Parthenon Gallery gallery in the New Acropolis Museum allows the metopes and frieze sculptures to be displayed in such a way as to be positionally faithful to their original location on the ancient building. In effect, this initiative restores to the surviving fragments their architectural significance, something which is being steadily erased from the cultural memory while they remain in the sepulchral gloom of the Duveen Galleries at the British Museum.

The importance of this aspect of Bernard Tschumi's design cannot be overestimated since it has profound implications for a universal understanding of ancient Greek architecture and for the appreciation of Pheidias's greatest achievement within the Periclean building programme.

The New Acropolis Museum therefore provides an opportunity to redress the ongoing misrepresentation of the Marbles in London as objects of negligible architectural significance.

Petty political issues and arguments over ownership and legality tend to overshadow important historical and aesthetic considerations. This is an issue that goes to the heart of how we view our shared architectural heritage. Moreover, the will to unify for shared enjoyment one of humankind's finest cultural achievements is ever more urgent in an increasingly fragmented and atomised world.

It's time to reunify the Parthenon Marbles in Athens. If the British Museum's trustees saw fit to do so it would be a feather in Neil MacGregor's cap and would do wonders for the British Museum's status as a true 'world museum'.

It would be great to see the Parthenon Sculptures in Athens, reunited, as this peerless work of art deserves to be. The marbles do belong to everyone and that is why it would best for them to be displayed in Athens long term rather than in London. The Acropolis attracts more visitors than the British Museum and am sure so will the New Acropolis Museum. It is time for the British Museum to really appreciate the meaning of these marbles and to do the right thing by consenting to reunite them. Such a gesture will be recognised by all as the best solution to what has been a sad state of affairs for more than two centuries. We live in progressive times where vision is needed to create understanding - I say its time to show that British citizens understand what these sculptures actually mean and why reuniting them in Athens, would make the majority even more proud to be British.