Prime Minister Boris Johnson, reputedly an admirer of ancient Greek culture, recently reaffirmed the UK government’s intention to hold on to the Elgin Marbles for the time being. Mr Johnson accordingly informed Yannis Andritsopoulos, London correspondent for the Greek daily newspaper Ta Nea, on 12 March 2021, that the Parthenon Sculptures had been “legally acquired” under “the appropriate laws of the time”. These classical Greek marble sculptures, dating back to the fifth century BC and mostly attributed to the master-sculptor Phidias, were originally conveyed to England during the early 19th century by art-loving Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, a Scottish aristocrat, soldier, and diplomat.
Lord Elgin was sent to Constantinople, partly for health reasons, in 1799 as British ambassador to the Sublime Porte, a post he held until 1803. During this time, Greece was under Ottoman rule and the once powerful nation-state of Athens had been reduced to an obscure village in a backwater of the Ottoman Empire. Many of its glorious landmarks lay in ruins, including the once-mighty Parthenon, the temple of the goddess Athena, in the hilltop citadel known as the Acropolis. The Parthenon had indeed been largely destroyed by a gunpowder explosion back in 1687, during the Morean war between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, and what was left was in a poor state of repair.
Elgin appeared on the scene in Athens after supposedly receiving a firman, or letter of instruction, from the Sublime Porte in the summer of 1801, which authorised him to explore and document the ruins and to salvage “any pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures thereon”. These artefacts did not form part of the Ottoman heritage and many did not even comply with Islamic standards of art, which proscribed human statuary in particular. Elgin took with him a team of artists to sketch and paint the many buildings, monuments and sculptures of ancient Athens. Elgin’s Athenian interlude was enabled by Britain’s positive contribution to the war effort against the French during the Battle of the Nile, at a time when Egypt was still an Ottoman possession. During his time in Athens, he proceeded to remove a series of sculptures from the Parthenon and other buildings in the Acropolis, including the Erechtheion and the Propylaea. These sculptures were then shipped back to England in stages, including a near-miss when the HMS Mentor sank in a storm in 1804, although its entire contents were eventually salvaged.
Once back in London, Lord Elgin was criticised by many, including Lord Byron, the great friend of the Greeks, for the manner in which he had acquired his collection of sculptures. At first, he even struggled to find a suitable buyer . Finally, in 1810, after publishing a Memorandum on the Subject of the Earl of Elgin’s Pursuits in Greece, he managed to sell his marbles to the British government for £35,000, a sum that was far below the costs he had incurred in transporting them to England . Following scrutiny by a Parliamentary Select Committee in the House of Commons in 1816, the sculptures were handed over in perpetuity to the trustees of the British Museum, where they have remained ever since, most recently in the purpose-built Duveen Gallery.
The Elgin Marbles consist of 15 metopes (carved plaques), 17 statues from the pediments, and 247 feet out of the original 524 feet of continuous frieze, all from the Parthenon, and feature among the prize exhibits of the British Museum. But ever since Greek independence in 1832 there have been repeated demands for their return to Athens, which have been resisted by both the UK government and the British Museum itself. There has even been a surge of support from within the UK, in the form of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, for their repatriation to Greece.
Defenders of the status quo claim that the marbles were obtained lawfully, have been well looked after, and received much higher viewing figures in London than would have been possible in Athens, making them worthy ‘cultural ambassadors’. Some scholars even point out that the independent Republic of Athens long preceded the state of Greece, and hence Athenian artefacts cannot be considered symbols of Greek nationhood. But the legality of the process by which an occupied nation’s cultural heritage was removed to a third-party nation has been consistently challenged by the Greeks, with a particularly prominent campaign being orchestrated by the Greek minister of culture Melina Mercouri during the 1980s. The construction of a new Acropolis Museum, which opened in Athens in 2009, has only intensified calls for the return of the marbles to what is felt to be their rightful place alongside other local cultural exhibits.
Both sides have reached a stalemate. Greek cultural nationalism and a British desire to retain possession of its acquisitions from a colonial past are mutually incompatible. This state of impasse comes at a time when re-energised nationalist sentiments and a worldwide move to seek redress for the colonial past are prompting the return of historical artefacts to their creators and original owners. The Elgin Marbles have come to symbolise a situation where museums in the West have come under threat from demands for repatriation of artefacts obtained under wholly different circumstances. When it comes to the question of the marbles, a rejection by the UK government of offers of mediation means there can be no possible solution in sight.
Ashis Banerjee