hypothetical agreement between London and Athens to «lend them» – Corriere.it

That an agreement between London and Athens on the marbles of the Parthenon is approaching? The management of the British Museum, according to press rumors, would be close to signing an agreement on the valuables works removed from the Athenian Acropolis beginning in 1801 by Lord Elgin, then ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

If on the one hand a 1963 law prohibits the museum from disposing of cultural treasures, on the other George Osborne, former government treasury secretary curator of David Cameron, now head of the museum’s board of directors, would have found a formula together with the Greek authorities that would allow the loan of the sculptures to Athens in the long term, a cultural exchange on the basis of which the British would obtain from Athens other very important works of the Ancient Greece.

Marble is a very thorny issue for the two governments and for the British Museum. Already in 1811 Lord Byron defined Lord Elgin’s actions as an act of vandalism in a poem written in Athens immediately after having visited the Parthenon and viewed the results of the British operation, a composition in which he wished, on behalf of the goddess Athena, revenge against of the lord and his country. Elgin claimed to have obtained the go-ahead from the Ottoman government, without however being able to provide any document in this regard. Following a debate in Parliament, the marbles were purchased from London and transported by sea to the British Museum, where they are still on display today.

Since its independence in 1832, Greece has wanted them back; an uninterrupted campaign that reached the international arena in the 1980s thanks above all to Melina Merkouri, actress, singer and Minister for Culture at the time. In 2014, UNESCO agreed to mediate the deal. This last chapter between London and Athens – if indeed a conclusion has been reached – opened a year ago, when Osborne began to deal directly with the Greek authorities.

It played in Greece’s favor, certainly, Italy’s decision last year to hand over the «fragment of Palermo» indefinitely which Elgin had given in the 19th century to Lord Fagan, then the English consul in Sicily. Demonstrating the importance of the development, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis attended the ceremony where the fragment was welcomed into the museum built specifically for marble near the Parthenon. “He’s the first to come back,” he’d said. Last month, again from Italy, another historic decision. Pope francesco has chosen to return to the archbishop of Athens and to all of Greece the three fragments which have been kept for centuries in the Pontifical Collections and the Vatican Museums.

The new agreement, still unconfirmed, could mark an epochal turning point, but it is unlikely that it will fully satisfy Greece, which claims ownership of the marbles. According to what is learned, it is possible that the London museum will start by lending a small part of the works in exchange for other treasures. For the first time he admitted that he had engaged in a “constructive dialogue”. The moment, on the other hand, is propitious: the British will soon begin a restructuring work that will also affect the galleries of the Parthenon, which urgently need an intervention.

For now, it seems out of the question that all the marbles are transferred to Athens. The London museum has in fact specified that it has “publicly requested the creation of a collaboration on the Parthenon with Greece” and at the same time that it has no intention of dismantling its “large collection”. The marbles, he points out, according to British law are the property of the British Museum.

This is the crux that could throw the compromise upside down, as demonstrated by the denials arriving from Athens regarding the imminent signing of an agreement. By accepting a loan, even long-term, Greece would effectively recognize that the works belong to London, a datum that would be politically difficult to record, although in exchange it could begin to repopulate that top floor of a museum where the reliefs of the Parthenon left in Athens are combined with the plaster copies of the sculptures found in London.