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Greece Rejects British Museum's Terms For Elgin Marbles Loan

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Bianca
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« on: June 11, 2009, 07:55:13 pm »











                            Greece Rejects British Museum’s Terms for Elgin Marbles Loan






By Maria Petrakis
June 11, 2009
(Bloomberg)

-- Greece said it won’t accept the British Museum’s conditions for allowing the Elgin Marbles, a collection of disputed ancient artworks, to go on display at the New Acropolis Museum.

Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said the museum’s loan condition -- that Greece acknowledge the fifth-century B.C. antiquities as the property of the British Museum -- would be unacceptable to any Greek government.

“Accepting this is tantamount to legitimizing the snatching of the marbles and the carving up of the monument 207 years ago,” Samaras said in an e-mailed statement.

He said Greece would be willing to loan other antiquities to the British Museum “to fill the gap when the marbles are returned to the country they belong.”

The New Acropolis Museum, constructed to house antiquities from the 2,500-year-old Parthenon Temple, officially opens on June 20. Replicas of the artworks in London, which were taken from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin in the 19th century, while Greece was under Ottoman rule, will be displayed alongside relics left in Greece.

Successive U.K. governments have declared that the marbles will not be returned. The British Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, said in a 2007 interview that objects in the collection could in theory be loaned for three or six months, though this would be impossible while the Greek government refuses to acknowledge that his trustees are the legal owners of the stones.

The fifth-century B.C. frieze depicts gods, giants, people and centaurs in the annual Panathenaic procession.




For more information on the museum, go to http:
//www.newacropolismuseum.gr/eng/.


To contact the writer on the story:
Maria Petrakis in Athens at mpetrakis@bloomberg.net
 
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Bianca
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« Reply #1 on: June 11, 2009, 07:56:54 pm »




             









                                                        Romancing the Stones







By Cathleen McGuigan
| NEWSWEEK
Published Jun 6, 2009
From the magazine issue
dated Jun 15, 2009
   

It's not polite to call the Elgin Marbles the Elgin Marbles anymore.

Not even in the British Museum, where the ancient Greek sculptures and reliefs have resided since the
early 19th century, after a British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire named Lord Elgin hacked them
off the Parthenon.

Even in that age of imperialism, many Brits saw Elgin's acts as cultural vandalism. Lord Byron slammed
the marbles' removal in his bestselling epic poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

The call for their return has grown since Greece won its independence from Ottoman rule in 1829, led by the Greek government in particular since the 1980s. In the noisy debate over the restitution of ancient artworks to their original locale, no case is more controversial or inflamed than the question of the Parthenon marbles: should the British finally send them back?

Later this month a new Acropolis Museum will open in the shadow of the Parthenon in Athens.

The building is more than a bold composition in glass, steel, concrete and stone: it is architecture as argument, explicitly meant to sway opinion over the fate of the marbles. Designed by the Swiss-born,
New York–based Bernard Tschumi, the three-level structure begins to express its agenda in the way it defers to an ancient settlement that was discovered during excavation of the construction site. (The building was adapted so that it is raised on concrete pillars, allowing archeological work to continue beneath it—and with glass floors that will give visitors a dramatic view of the ongoing dig.)

But it's the crown of the museum that will make the most powerful case for restitution: the top floor is a glass box that is canted at an angle away from the structure beneath it—like an uneven stack of cartons—so that it lines up perfectly with the Parthenon, visible about 1,000 feet away.

Many of the Parthenon's original sculptures were lost or destroyed over the centuries; those remaining on the temple were removed in recent years because the pollution in Athens was eating away the marble. Now, along with other sculptures, the frieze that encircled the temple—it depicts a procession of figures, some bringing sacrifices—is installed in the new museum in its original configuration on the Parthenon.

To accentuate the ghostly absence of the missing marbles, there are white plaster copies to fill the gaps.
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Bianca
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« Reply #2 on: June 11, 2009, 07:58:15 pm »










The history of how the marbles got to London is muddy enough to bolster both sides of the argument. When the seventh Earl of Elgin took up residence in the embassy in Constantinople in 1799, he began to pursue his passion for classical antiquities. He sent emissaries on a mission to -Athens, which was then a shabby little outpost that had been under the Ottoman thumb for 400 years.

At first, Elgin wanted only some sketches and plaster casts made of the great sculptures and reliefs on the Parthenon and other nearby ruins. But his permit from the Ottoman sultan granted his crew access to the Acropolis—then a Turkish garrison—and stated that "no one meddle with their scaffolding or implements nor hinder them from taking away any pieces of stone with inscriptions and figures."

Politics was at play here at least as much as art appreciation.

The Ottomans were grateful to Britain, which had blocked the advance of Napoleon in Egypt—and over several years, Elgin's agents chiseled away at the most potent symbol of the golden age of classical Greeks.

But the gods got even, with Elgin at least.

In the course of his Ottoman escapade, he lost the following: his beautiful and rich wife to his best friend, a big chunk of his nose to a nasty infection he'd caught in Constantinople and, ultimately, his marbles, which he was forced to sell to the British government in 1816 for £35,000 (roughly equivalent to $4 million today) to dig himself out of debt after his divorce.
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Bianca
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« Reply #3 on: June 11, 2009, 07:59:42 pm »










Since then, the trustees of the British Museum have never wavered in their position that Elgin's marbles legally belong to the museum.

Scholars long argued that the marbles were better preserved in London than they would be in smog-choked Athens, with its poor museum facilities.

"The British said, you don't deserve them, you don't have a place to put them," says Antonis Samaras, the new minister of culture in Greece. "Now we have one of the best museums that can be."

But rather than trying to negotiate the point right now, the Greeks are letting their new museum do
the talking.

"We are presenting in a visual way what was, to this point, a verbal discussion,"

says the museum's president, Dimitrios Pandermalis.



Is there a glimmer of hope that all the remaining marbles from the Parthenon might eventually be reunited, at least temporarily?

The trustees of the British Museum have stated they would consider lending the marbles to Athens—though some are too fragile to travel in either direction, notes the director, Neil MacGregor—provided the Greek government acknowledge Britain's ownership of the artworks.

For many Greeks, that's a sore point.

"How can anyone dare say they belong to the British?"
asks Samaras.

"These are treasures taken out of the Acropolis when Greece was under enemy occupation."

Pandermalis takes a gentler, less political approach: he suggests that Greece could lend other classical pieces to London in exchange for a long-term loan of the marbles. "It's not easy," he says, "but let's find a solution for both sides."
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Bianca
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« Reply #4 on: June 11, 2009, 08:08:04 pm »






NO, BOTH THE BRITISH MUSEUM AND THE BERLIN MUSEUM KNOWLINGLY PURCHASED




                                                   S T O L E N   G O O D S !
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Bianca
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« Reply #5 on: June 11, 2009, 08:21:33 pm »








IT IS GOOD TO SEE    K  A  R  M  A    IN ACTION:






                                                        PRIAM'S TREASURE





Apparently, Schliemann smuggled Priam's Treasure out of Anatolia.

The Ottoman official assigned to watch the excavation, Amin Effendi, received a prison sentence.

The Ottoman government revoked Schliemann's permission to dig and sued him for its share of the gold.

 Schliemann went on to Mycenae. There, however, the Greek Archaeological Society sent an agent to monitor him.

Later Schliemann traded some treasure to the government of the Ottoman Empire in exchange for permission to dig at Troy again. It is located in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum.

The rest was acquired in 1880 by the Imperial Museum of Berlin (it was on display for a time at the Pergamon Museum), in whose hands it remained until 1945, when it disappeared from a protective bunker beneath the Berlin Zoo.

In fact, the treasure had been removed to the Soviet Union by the Red Army. During the Cold War, the government of the Soviet Union denied any knowledge of the fate of Priam’s Treasure. However, in September 1993 the treasure turned up at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
 
The return of items taken from museums has been arranged in a treaty with Germany but, as of June 2004, is being blocked by museum directors in Russia.

They are keeping the looted art, they say, as compensation for the destruction of Russian cities and looting of Russian museums by Nazi Germany in World War II.




HOPEFULLY, THE BRITISH MUSEUM WILL FEEL ITS OWN  KARMA SOON.....
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Bianca
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« Reply #6 on: June 11, 2009, 08:25:42 pm »








READ ABOUT GREECE'S STRUGGLE TO REGAIN ITS HERITAGE

AND

SEE SOME PICTURES OF ITS BEAUTIFUL MARBLES HERE:



http://atlantisonline.smfforfree2.com/index.php/topic,3935.0.html
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