Rishi Sunak’s snub boosts Greek hopes for return
of marbles
PM’s ‘blunder’ highlights the issue of the disputed
Parthenon sculptures, fuelling campaign to send them home to Athens
Helena
Smith in Athens
Sun 3 Dec
2023 05.00 GMT
An air of
optimism pervades the Acropolis Museum. Blown in on a breeze from Britain, it
has come to fill its cavernous lobby, corridors and upper gallery, home of the
embodiment in marble of the glory that was the golden age: the Parthenon
sculptures.
In a week
when the row over the fifth-century BC antiquities has erupted with renewed
vigour, the goalposts have moved in unexpected ways. Which is why Nikos
Stampolidis, classical archaeologist by profession, and for the past two years
the museum’s director, is in ebullient mood. “It has been a magnificent week,”
he told the Observer. “I think it’s fair to say events are moving us forward
and are in our favour. I’m hopeful and very optimistic.”
Over the
past 24 months, Greece’s quest to reunite the treasures – bought by the British
Museum in 1816 from a bankrupt Lord Elgin, who himself acquired them in
circumstances deemed at best controversial – had already evolved in ways not
even Stampolidis could have dared to imagine. First came Italy’s return of the
Fagan fragment, an inaugural repatriation by one state to another of part of
the monumental frieze that once adorned the Parthenon, the Acropolis’
predominant temple, built in honour of warrior-goddess Athena.
Then came
the “gifting” of three more pieces from the Vatican: groundbreaking gestures in
the campaign to have the treasures restored to the place where they were
carved. “But it was something else, too,” said the director taking in the
plaster casts that, within view of the Parthenon, stand in place of the
“exiled” marbles now in London. “This great sea-change in sentiment in Britain
that could not go unnoticed.”
In Athens,
the outcry that has followed British prime minister Rishi Sunak’s abrupt
cancellation of talks with his Greek counterpart Kyriakos Mitsotakis – and
accusation of trying to “grandstand” over the artworks – is seen as manna from
heaven. For Greek officials, Sunak’s diplomatic “blunder” has not only
backfired but been an unprecedented boon for a campaign that, overnight, has
received more global publicity than at any other time.
Even
denizens of the UK’s “anti-woke” media have, officials point out, changed tack.
The outspoken TV presenter Piers Morgan, who long advocated for the sculptures’
retention, concluded last week that the time had come for “this great art [to]
be properly reunited in its natural habitat”. Mitsotakis’s argument, aired in a
BBC interview two days before he was due to meet Sunak, that keeping the
antiquities divided was tantamount to cutting “the Mona Lisa in half” had been
“persuasive”, Morgan noted.
But more
vividly it was the decision of King Charles to don a tie and breast
handkerchief festooned with the Greek flag as he delivered the opening speech
to the Cop28 climate summit on Friday that sealed any doubt that the row had
benefited Athens.
At a time
of dramatically shifting landscapes in cultural diplomacy, when restitution
claims of disputed artefacts were being met worldwide, it was hard not to see
the monarch’s sartorial choice as sending a “clear message”. In his last
official trip to the country of his father’s birth, Charles had confessed to a
“profound connection” to all things Hellenic, and joked about his “Greek
blood”.
“No amount
of money that the Greek government could have thrown at the campaign would have
helped as much,” said Irene Stamatoudi, a professor of cultural heritage law at
the University of Nicosia. Not since the early 1980s – when the former culture
minister Melina Mercouri first demanded they be restored to their homeland –
had the drive to retrieve the marbles been so alive.
“At first
it was hard to understand why the leader of a country with such a tradition of
debate would eschew discussion [with Mitsotakis],” she said, adding that in 30
years of advising governments in Athens she had never seen such interest in an
issue so integral to Greek identity. “But then it became very clear that what
had happened had put the debate on the map. The request for the marbles is the
oldest restitution claim in the world. At a time when so many in the UK now
support it, people are beginning to ask ‘why?’”
Greece had
been very clear, she added. It wanted nothing more than pieces that had once
decorated the Periclean masterpiece that is the Parthenon. “We don’t even want
the caryatid back because that adorned the Erechtheion [temple],” she said of
the maiden statue also removed by Elgin and displayed in the British Museum.
The marbles
were paramount because the Parthenon was so symbolic. In 1837, seven years
after Greece won independence – almost three decades after the Scottish
diplomat had the antiquities dismantled when the still stateless nation was
under Ottoman rule – the Greek Archaeological Service held its first meeting
amid the temple’s ruins because of its significance.
Anglo-Greek
tensions will soothe in time. Mitsotakis says he wants to put Sunak’s snub
behind him, and in George Osborne, the British Museum’s chair, he appears to
have found an ally. On Thursday, as the row rumbled on, the former chancellor
revealed that, if anything, the incident had provided the necessary clarity to
continue “secret” talks with the Greek government over a loan deal that would
see all manner of treasures being sent to London in return for the marbles
heading back home. “We obviously know we’re not going to get any particular
support from the Conservative government,” he said, referring to Sunak with
thinly veiled disdain in his podcast Political Currency.
Few in
Athens would have predicted the institution being cause for optimism in the
past. But at the Acropolis Museum last week, it was Osborne, and the British
Museum, that raised hopes of the cultural row being resolved – on a horizon
that has, just about, become visible.
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