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 