Culture They discover valuable remains on the ship that transported the Parthenon marbles to England and that was wrecked
Italy
has paved the way for the return to
Greece
of the
Parthenon
marbles . The Salinas de
Palermo
Archaeological Museum
will give the Acropolis Museum of
Athens
a piece of the frieze representing the goddesses
Peitho
or
Artemis
, for an initial period of four years and, possibly, indefinitely,
by virtue of an agreement whose wave expansive has reached London
.
The ball is now on the roof of
the British Museum
, under unprecedented pressure to return the so-called Elgin marbles, in honor of the diplomat who carried 75 meters from the Parthenon frieze to the UK in a controversial controversy. 19th century expedition questioned in its day as looting by Lord Byron himself.
Boris Johnson
himself
wrote a 1986 article in
Debate
magazine criticizing how the sculptures were "sawed off and hacked" from the Greek temple.
Johnson
was already proposing then that the marbles leave "this whiskey-loving northern culture"
and be returned "to the country of the sun and the Achilles landscape to which they belong."
The then young conservative student - a devotee of classical culture as he passed through
Oxford
- was more or less in tune with Labor Premier
Neil Kinnock
, who as early as 1984 made the futile promise to return the precious treasure to Greece with an argument: ' The Parthenon, without the marbles, is like a smile with several missing teeth.
Times have changed, and
Boris Johnson now claims that the UK is the 'rightful owner'
of the metopes and sculptures that made up half of the remaining decorative elements of the Parthenon when
Thomas Bruce
, 7th Earl of Elgin, used his tricks to convince the authorities of the Ottoman Empire that the marbles would be better preserved elsewhere.
Contradicting his own words as a student (rescued from the trunk of memories by the Greek newspaper
Ta Nea
), Boris Johnson now throws balls out. The future of the
Elgin Marbles
, in his view, must be decided by the Board of Trustees of the British Museum, chaired since last year by his co-religionist and former Secretary of the Treasury George Osborne. The museum's director, the German
Hartwig Fischer
, argues that the ideal location for the marbles is the current one, "at the intersection of world cultures and through time."
During the confinement of the covid, with the partial closure of the British, the controversy remained on the wing.
But with the reopening of the Greek galleries and the new exhibition of the marbles, last November, the Government of Athens returned to the charge as never before since the time of
Melina Mercouri
as Minister of Culture.
The offensive started in November from Greek Prime Minister
Kyriacos Mitsotakis
.
"It is essential that the marbles from the Parthenon in London meet the majority of the sculptures in Athens," he said.
And he called on Johnson to open negotiations, supported by the recent decision of a UNESCO committee that considers the return of the sculptures as "an intergovernmental matter."
Actress
Janet Suzman
, head of
the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles
, has asked the Johnson Government to follow the path marked out throughout 2021 by
Germany
,
Belgium
or
France
, with the return of art pieces looted in its colonies, including the Bronzes of Benin.
In the recent case of Italy, the initiative has come directly from the Salinas Regional Museum in Palermo, which acquired the fragment of the Acropolis frieze from the widow of the British consul in Palermo
Robert Fagal
.
"We are returning to its original context a small fragment (the foot of Peitho or Athemisa) but of high symbolic value", declared the director of the Italian museum,
Alberto Samonà
.
"It is a response to the international debate. But it is also a gesture of friendship between Greece and Sicily, who share a common history in the Mediterranean."
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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