8 STONE OF CONTENTION

One of Europe’s most important cultural symbols has long been a source of tension between Britain and Greece. Half of the Parthenon Marbles, known as the Elgin Marbles – fragments of classical Greek sculptures that once decorated the 2,500-year-old Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens – have been in the British Museum since the early 19th century. Lord Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, removed them from the ruins in 1801. The British Museum bought them in 1816 and displayed them in a temporary exhibition, depicted in the oil painting above. While the museum argues that Elgin took the sculptures with the permission of the Ottoman authorities to preserve them, others claim he stole them.