Could we be on course to lose ‘our’ Marbles?
Greece’s calls for the Elgin Marbles’ return have renewed the row over ‘difficult objects’, writes Gordon Rayner
After a charm offensive that stretched from Downing Street to Good Morning Britain, Greece’s Prime Minister had to return home this week without the prize he had come for.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis did not have the Elgin Marbles in his diplomatic bags, though he believes he would have every right to help himself to objects he insists were “stolen”.
Mitsotakis is not one to give up easily. His parting shot was to say that his demand for the reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures in Athens is no “flash in the pan” and that they will, one day, go home.
He has plenty of reasons to be optimistic. Public opinion is on his side, with a clear and growing majority of Britons believing the sculptures should be returned by the British Museum.
In Boris Johnson, he has a counterpart who keeps a bust of the ancient Athenian leader Pericles in his No10 office for inspiration. And if Johnson should decide he wants to nudge the British Museum towards returning the Marbles, he need only pick up the phone to the new chairman of its trustees, the former Tory chancellor George Osborne.
Meanwhile Amal Clooney, perhaps Britain’s most recognisable human rights lawyer, is advising the Greek culture ministry on their options and tactics.
There is, then, growing support for the Elgin Marbles, which have been contentious since the day they arrived in Britain more than 200 years ago, to be returned to Greece, where they would be housed in a purpose-built museum that stands in the shadow of the Parthenon itself. Waiting there are the sculptures that Lord Elgin, the former British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, left behind, with the whole collection split roughly 50/50 between London and Athens.
Mitsotakis’s comment that the Museum was being “anachronistic” in its approach also referenced a much wider debate about the return of artefacts – and human remains – to their countries of origin, which could radically reshape the collections of museums and art galleries across the western world.
Some internationally-renowned institutions have already begun returning their treasures. Earlier this year the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC sent a spectacular gold breastplate, the Sol de Soles, back to Peru, where it was made more than 2,000 years ago. A mass repatriation of African cultural objects is also underway from museums around the world, with Benin Bronzes from Nigeria among the most famous. Some are being sent from museums in Britain.
The British Museum, then, might understandably be worried that it could be denuded if it bows to pressure to give back the Elgin Marbles, though that is not its official reason for refusing their return. What is undisputed is that the return of the Marbles would be the world’s most significant such repatriation, and could have repercussions across the globe.
“It would be psychologically challenging for any trustee of the British Museum to allow the removal of an entire hall of sculptures in one go,” said Alexander Herman, author of Restitution: The Return of Cultural Artefacts. “But there is a definite shift towards museums in Europe and further afield changing their position on repatriation.
“It has really gathered pace in the last five years, and other countries with a colonial past, like Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, are all moving forward with this.”
As Boris Johnson told Kyriakos Mitsotakis this week, the British Museum and the Government do not believe the Elgin Marbles should be part of that trend.
The centuries-old row
The Elgin Marbles, carved under the supervision of the master sculptor Pheidias between 447 and 432BC, consist of 247ft (75m) of a frieze that ran all the way around Parthenon, together with 17 figures of the gods and legendary figures from the pediments at either end of the building, and 15 metopes, or relief panels, from above the columns.
The centuries-old row divides into a legal argument and a moral one. On the issue of legal ownership, the British Museum’s position is that in 1801 Lord Elgin was granted permission by the Ottomans, who ruled Greece at the time, to remove the sculptures from the Parthenon, a building the regime did not value (it was even used as a munitions store, leading to huge damage when an Italian cannonball hit it in 1687). The Museum claims a permit, known as a firmin, proves this, and that his actions were “thoroughly investigated” by Parliament in 1816, which found he had acted legally. Elgin’s defenders also say he believed the Marbles were in danger of being lost forever at a time of war, and saved them for posterity (though it is also true that he originally intended to use them to decorate his home in Scotland, before financial troubles forced their sale to the nation).
The Greeks, though, say the firmin is a forgery, and a poor one at that, making the claim to ownership invalid.
It is this dispute over ownership that stands at the heart of the diplomatic impasse: the Museum is prepared to loan the sculptures to Greece, but Mitsotakis insists the Museum cannot loan objects it does not own, and will only settle for a permanent, no-strings return.
Then there is the moral aspect. The Greeks, who defeated the Ottomans with Britain’s help in a war of independence 16 years after Elgin had finished his removal job, regarded their hated Turkish neighbours as an occupying force who had no right to give the Marbles away (even if the firmin was genuine). Mitsotakis’s claim that they were “stolen” is only part of his argument. Why, he says, would an ally of Greece refuse to return one half of a national monument – and one of the world’s great architectural treasures – when it can only be appreciated as a whole?
British visitors to the Acropolis Museum, opened in 2009, are treated to a guilt trip that constantly refers to the missing pieces of the puzzle, with gaps marked “BM”, while an audiovisual display shows how the chest of Poseidon, which is in Athens, would look if it was reunited with the rest of his torso, which is in London.
Dame Janet Suzman, the actress, is the chairman of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, which numbers some of the country’s most learned classicists among its members. She said: “The British Museum is demonstrably behind the curve. The Louvre, the Rijksmuseum [in Amsterdam] and other world-class institutions have started returning items, so it’s a bit smug for the British Museum to refuse to engage.
“It just keeps trotting out the same mantra it has clung to for the past 200 years. It’s terribly impolite for them to just stay silent on this.”
One of the British Museum’s reasons for keeping the Marbles here is that: “There is a positive advantage and public benefit in having the sculptures divided between two great museums,” because in Athens they can be seen “against the backdrop of Athenian history” and in London visitors “can gain insight into how ancient Greece influenced...other civilisations”.
Dame Janet said: “This is just childish, finders keepers stuff. They were brought here, they excited the western world and classical scholarship went up. They have done their job and it’s time for them to go home. It is a moral obligation.
“Anyone who goes to the museum in Athens can see that that is where they should be. In the British Museum they are in gloomy rooms on grey plinths and it’s quite a depressing experience.”
Dame Janet’s committee was formed in 1983, inspired by a campaign by the then Greek culture minister, the actress Melina Mercouri. Three years later Mercouri was invited to Oxford University to speak before a debate titled “the Elgin Marbles must be returned to Athens”.
The president of the Oxford Union debating society who invited her to speak was Boris Johnson. Mitsotakis mistakenly believes this means Johnson was an advocate of their return when he was a student, but others who took part in the debate have told the Telegraph that Johnson did not speak in it, and he in fact wrote an article for a student magazine arguing that they should stay here.
In truth, Johnson has mocked those who say the Marbles should go back, suggesting when he was Mayor of London that George Clooney, the actor and husband of Amal, had lost his own marbles and was pursuing a “Hitlerian agenda”. (Clooney responded by saying Johnson had been guilty of “too much hyperbole washed down with a few whiskies”).
Opening Pandora’s Box
‘They have done their job and it’s time for them to go home. It is a moral obligation’
Osborne copied Johnson’s jibe about people losing their marbles when, in 2016, he made a similar comment about the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis in relation to the sculptures.
Yet Mitsotakis, who has the jovial charm of a latter-day Zeus, intends to keep working on Johnson. Having failed to persuade Johnson that this year’s 200th anniversary of Greek independence was a good time to make a grand gesture, he told the Telegraph he will use the 200th anniversary of the death of Lord Byron to press home his point.
Byron was appalled by Elgin’s actions, accusing him of vandalism and looting, and used his satirical poem
The Curse of Minerva to denounce him and his supporters.
Mitsotakis also has public opinion on his side. When the polling firm Yougov asked people in the UK in 2018 where the Marbles belonged, 56 per cent said Greece, with only 20 per cent believing they should stay in Britain – a significant increase on earlier polls.
On the wider issue of returning artefacts to their country of origin, 62 per cent were in favour in a poll carried out this year, with only 15 per cent against. Letters to the editor of
The Daily Telegraph on the subject this week have been marginally in favour of returning the sculptures.
Unesco is also putting pressure on Britain. Unesco’s Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property last month urged the British Museum to revisit the issue, citing, in part, “the poor conditions of exposure that the sculptures are kept in at the British Museum”. Mitsotakis pointed out that the gallery which houses them has still not reopened post-lockdown because of a leaky roof.
Crucially, Unesco also suggested that the destiny of the Marbles was an issue that should involve the Government, undermining Johnson’s excuse that ministers cannot get involved because the Marbles are owned by the British Museum. In turn, the British Museum says it cannot give the Marbles back because it would be
in contravention of the British Museum Act 1963 – a Catch-22 situation that suits both parties.
Damian Green, the former first secretary of state and now a member of the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, is among those who believes the Marbles should stay.
He said: “I have always taken the view that they are well looked after in this country, so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If a valuable object that people can learn from and be inspired by is well preserved and can be seen by millions of people then leave it there.”
He is also concerned about opening what the Greeks might call a Pandora’s Box if the Marbles were to be returned.
He said: “If you start saying that historic artefacts should all be returned to their place of creation, the western world’s museums and art galleries are going to be pretty vacant and I’m not sure it’s possible to create a coherent policy of what should be where.
“Should the Mona Lisa go back to Italy? Are you going to break up the Crown? It’s got a lot of jewels on it from other countries but you would have to destroy the object to return them.”
Herman does not believe the “thin end of the wedge” argument holds water. He pointed out that there have been few requests for the return of objects to their place of origin, with even the Rosetta Stone, perhaps the British Museum’s most famous treasure, attracting no formal bids from the Egyptians. Hardline restitutionists make the argument that even if the British Museum did have to return large numbers of items, it has deep reserves, with seven million objects in its archives, as opposed to one million on display.
A rush to restitution
Aside from objects that may or may not have been looted by the Nazis, the British Museum lists six objects or groups of objects in its possession that are “contested”.
They are a wooden shield from Australia; two stone Moai sculptures from Easter Island; the Benin Bronzes; the Elgin Marbles; human remains and the Maqdala collection of 80 objects from northern Ethiopia.
In the case of the Benin Bronzes, taken from the kingdom’s royal palace by the British in 1897, it has reached an agreement with other museums around the world that it will loan parts of its collection to Nigeria on a rotating basis once a purpose-built museum has been completed in Benin City.
Human remains are a fascinating sub-category in themselves: the British Museum houses the remains of 6,000 people (only half the number that are in the Natural History Museum) and a small number have been returned to Tasmania and New Zealand after protests by First Nation peoples.
Even displaying human remains is now contentious. In Oxford the Pitt Rivers Museum recently removed from display one of its most popular exhibits, its collection of Shuar Tsantsas, or shrunken heads, which are considered sacred to the Shuar people of Ecuador. An “ethical review” during the museum’s Covid-enforced closure led to the removal of 120 sets of human remains, including South Asian Naga trophy heads and the mummified remains of an Egyptian child.
A major catalyst for the current rush to restitution was a speech made by France’s President Emmanuel Macron in Ouagadougou in 2017, when he raised the bar by saying: “I cannot accept that a large share of several African countries’ cultural heritage be kept in France. There are historical explanations for it, but there is no valid, lasting and unconditional justification.”
Needless to say, French bureaucracy has got in the way of his vision, as new laws must be passed to allow objects to leave, but his words resonated in the art world and emboldened African nations to demand returns. The University of Aberdeen and Jesus College, Cambridge are among the institutions that have recently returned bronzes to Nigeria.
There is, it must be said, a certain degree of hypocrisy at play. The Louvre has not so far offered to return its own Parthenon Sculptures. Denmark, too, has fragments of the sculptures in its collections.
While the Germans have agreed to return Benin Bronzes, they have not made any moves towards returning the Nefertiti bust, which has been claimed by Egypt since 1924, shortly after its discovery by German archaeologists.
Could the British Museum and others be missing a trick by refusing to return objects? Mitsotakis has promised to loan priceless items that have never before left Greece to the British Museum if the Elgin Marbles are returned. Herman suggested historians would go “weak at the knees” at the prospect of Agamemnon’s pure gold death mask being displayed in London, and visitor numbers could increase if the public are enticed to make return visits whenever something shiny and new is on display.
There is another upside to loan deals: while the British Museum is not allowed to charge for general admission, it can charge for entry to temporary exhibitions of loaned artefacts. And that is the sort of argument that even George Osborne would understand.
‘If a valuable object that people can learn from can be seen by millions then leave it here’