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Greeks Go for All the Marbles In Effort to Get Back Artifacts

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Bianca
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« Reply #30 on: December 04, 2008, 08:42:01 am »



The "Elgin" Marbles
British Museum










                    Greece Honours Three Academics For Efforts In Recovering "Elgin Marbles"







Parthenon Marbles



Dec. 3, 2008
Athens, Greece

   Culture Minister Mihalis Liapis on Tuesday addressed an event held at the new Acropolis Museum in honour of three academics who have made great contributions to the effort for the return of the Parthenon Marbles currently held at the British Museum in London.

    The three are Prof. Tonio Holscher, professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, Prof. Louis Godart, advisor to the Italian President for the Conservation of Artistic Patrimony and professor of Mycenean Philology at Federico II University of Naples, and Prof. Antonia Sofikitou, who is chair of the Italian Committee for the Return of the Parthenon Marbles and teaches Modern Greek Literature at the University of Palermo.

    Liapis praised the "inestimable contribution" made by the three to Greece's efforts to bring back the sculptures removed from the frieze of the Parthenon and taken to London by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century, so that they can be reunited with the rest of the world-famous monument.

    According to the minister, the three academics were "citizens of the world" and "ambassadors of the ancient Greek spirit".

    Tuesday's event at the Acropolis Museum also coincided with the return from Sweden of an architectural fragment taken from the Athens Acropolis, which was returned by an ordinary Swedish citizen who had inherited the fragment from her Austrian grandfather, a soldier during the Second World War. It was returned via the Swedish Committee for the Return of the Parthenon Marbles, which the woman originally contacted.

    The marble fragment bears wavy carvings, similar to those found on the capitals of ancient columns, and an inscription saying "souvenir from the Athens Acropolis" in the form of modern Greek known as "katharevousa" that was quite widely used in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its return to Greece will allow it to be studied and properly dated.

    During his address, Liapis also announced the results of a UNESCO intergovernmental committee meeting for promoting the return of cultural assets to their country of origin, which decided to adopt a resolution that recognises and underlines the need to return cultural items to their country of origin, especially those considered to be of outstanding global importance.



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« Reply #31 on: December 04, 2008, 08:48:05 am »



The Vatican`s fragment of the frieze,
measuring 24 by 25 cm,
depicts the head of a man carrying a tray.









                                       Vatican Lends Parthenon Marbles Fragment To Greece







November 05, 2008

The Vatican returned a small fragment of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece on Wednesday on a one-year loan, fuelling calls for the British Museum to hand back its own priceless sculptures from the ancient temple. The loan of the fragment, one of three in the Vatican Museum's vast collection of antiquities, follows a request for its return by Greece's late Orthodox Archbishop Christopoulos at a meeting with Pope Benedict in 2006.
In recent years Greece has stepped up its campaign to recover large sections of the frieze removed from the Parthenon in 1801 by Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin and British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

The Vatican's fragment of the frieze, measuring 24 by 25 cm, depicts the head of a man carrying a tray. Just over a month ago Italy handed over a small section of the Parthenon Marbles housed in a museum in Palermo, Sicily.

"This is a very important event," said Greek Culture Minister Michalis Liapis. "It should be an example to follow for the return of the Parthenon Marbles."

The Elgin Marbles comprise roughly half the 160 metre (yard) frieze which adorned the temple of Athena on the Acropolis, completed in 432 BC as the crowning glory of Athens' Golden Age.

They were bought by the British government in 1816 from the bankrupt Elgin, and given to the British Museum "in perpetuity".

The British Museum has refused to return the treasures, which it says were acquired by Elgin through a legitimate contract with the Ottoman Empire that then ruled Greece.

It also said its marbles were in better condition than those left behind, which suffered from the Athens pollution.

Greece says the completion of a 100-million-euro museum at the foot of the Acropolis, which will open to the public next year, means the time is ripe for their return.

Sweden, Germany and Italy have returned pieces taken from the Acropolis, but many artefacts remain in collections in Denmark, Germany, Austria and France, archaeologists say.

Giandomenico Spinola, head of the Vatican Museum's classical antiquities department, said it was too early to say whether the loan of the piece would be renewed after one year or whether it could be extended to other pieces in the museum's collection.

"All the artefacts in the museum belong to the Pope, only he can make a decision," Spinola told Reuters.



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« Reply #32 on: June 03, 2009, 12:09:19 pm »









                           Return Elgin Marbles, Says Acropolis Museum Creator: Interview






Interview by Maria Petrakis
May 27, 2009
(Bloomberg)

-- Bernard Tschumi can afford a smile as he looks around at his new creation, the New Acropolis Museum, after an eight-year campaign to get it designed and built.

The Swiss-born architect has been on a Greek odyssey to get the $177 million structure ready, visiting Athens frequently to balance demands of conservationists, planners and archaeologists.

The museum officially opens on June 20 and is Greece’s answer to the British argument that there’s nowhere in its capital to house the Elgin Marbles, the sculptures taken from the Parthenon’s frieze to the British Museum. Tschumi argues that the stones should be the centerpiece of his gleaming concrete and glass building, which was constructed to house them and to boost the Greek case for their return. Replicas of the London stones will sit next to those left in Greece.

“You can have a Van Gogh at the Metropolitan and another at the Louvre,” Tschumi says. But, the Parthenon Marbles are “one story. It’s got to be together at the same place and there’s no better place than here.”

Successive U.K. governments have repeatedly declared that the marbles will not be returned. The British Museum’s director Neil MacGregor, in a 2007 interview, said objects in the collection could in theory be loaned for three or six months, though this would be impossible while the Greek government refused to acknowledge that his trustees are the legal owners of the stones. 
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« Reply #33 on: June 03, 2009, 12:11:18 pm »










Gods, Giants



The fifth-century B.C. frieze depicts gods, giants, Greeks and centaurs in the annual Panathenaic procession. The new museum’s rectangular shape marks the continuity and narrative with the Parthenon temple on the top of a hill 300 meters above it.

Tschumi, 65, says that some archaeologists didn’t want him to build above an ancient city. He had to negotiate over where to put the concrete pillars that support the three-story museum. At the entrance, some of the pillars are just four inches (10 centimeters) away from millennia-old walls. All had to be built to be able to withstand earthquakes.

“I was caught between a rock and a hard place,” said Tschumi, who has longish graying hair. “I had my structural engineers who wanted to put a lot of walls and beams and, on the other hand, the archaeologists who said ‘touch nothing.’ I spent days walking and saying can we put it here; let’s move it a little bit to the left.” 
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« Reply #34 on: June 03, 2009, 12:12:52 pm »










Three Decades



The museum will open more than three decades after the 1976 first call for a design, and 10 years since the discovery of an ancient city forced the Greeks to seek a new one, incorporating the excavations. The final concrete and marble geometric design, by Tschumi in collaboration with Greek architect Michael Photiadis, was chosen after a competition in September 2001.

The glass gallery is the main event, swiveled at an angle to the rest of the building. With the temple above, excavations and archaeologists underfoot, and constrained by a small plot surrounded by apartment buildings, Tschumi says the design is inspired more by Pythagoras, the 6th-century B.C. mathematician, than by Phidias, the master-sculptor of the time who oversaw the construction of the temple.

“There’s no way at the beginning of the 21st century you can try to imitate even superficially the art of 2,500 years ago,” he says. The “precision of the concept was really what counted and we were not going to do little design games.”
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« Reply #35 on: June 03, 2009, 12:14:19 pm »









On the Move



Tschumi is constantly on the move: talking to a glazier who says he has invented a new kind of glass for one of the displays, greeting workmen and discussing angles of a promotional shot with a photographer.

He designed Paris’s Parc de la Villette and is a former dean of Columbia University’s school of architecture. Tschumi has spent longer on this construction site than on any other project, working on everything from decor to structure.

“A lot of time” was used by testing glazing for the middle section, the archaic gallery. It was important to blur the view of “people putting out their washing, broken refrigerators left on the balcony,” he says.

Now, as visitors wind their way amid the freestanding statues of gods, fragments and busts, there’s only outlines of the modern city and the apartment terraces just meters away. Tschumi calls them “the ghosts of Athens.”

Artisans and builders are swarming over the structure and paving the streets outside. A dilapidated building still sits on one corner of the plot, testimony to the court challenges from residents and homeowners that helped delay construction. Tschumi says the museum will be ready.

“I’m not worried about it,” he shrugs. “The Greek way.”

He won’t be drawn into the latest debate over the museum, whether two historic buildings facing the Acropolis should be torn down to provide an uninterrupted view and archaeologists’ access to more ruins.

“Polemic is a Greek word,” he says.






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



Last Updated: May 26, 2009 19:00 EDT
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« Reply #36 on: June 03, 2009, 12:18:03 pm »









                              No invite for Lord Elgin heirs as New Acropolis Museum opens






Europe Features
By Christine Pirovolakis
May 21, 2009
Deutsche Press Agentur
Athens

- When Greece's long-awaited Acropolis Museum finally opens its doors next month, foreign presidents, international dignitaries and officials from the British Museum will be invited to celebrate.

But one group has been banned from party: the descendants of Lord Thomas Elgin - the man Greece blames for removing friezes from the ancient Parthenon temple and then selling them to the British Museum in London, where they are currently on display.

Located at the foot of the ancient Acropolis in Athens, the new 20,000-square-metre museum was planned as the new home for the 160- metre-long strip of marble that adorned the Parthenon until 1801.

'The opening of the Acropolis Museum is a major world event and on June 20th it will be a day of celebration for all civilized people, not just for Greeks alone,' Greek Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said.

Greece will mark the opening of the new museum, nearly three decades after the building was first proposed, with a week-long party.

The new 120-million-euro (160-million-dollar) museum is the Greek government's key argument for the return of the Parthenon, or Elgin, marbles from Britain.

Lord Elgin, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, removed the friezes from the temple when Athens was under Ottoman occupation some 200 years ago.

They were then sold to the British Museum which has since refused to relinquish the sculptures that include depictions of religious and mythological scenes, insisting the transaction was legal.

London has long argued that Athens lacks a proper display space to ensure the safety and preservation for these priceless antiquities.

The Greek government, it appears, is set to prove them wrong.

Designed by New York architect Bernard Tschumi to offer visitors direct visual contact with the Parthenon temple itself, the entire top-floor gallery of the new museum offers a simultaneous view of the frieze and the ancient site.

The top-floor gallery fits the exact dimensions of the Parthenon temple and its 115 panels. Greece only possesses 36 of them, but will display replicas of the rest.

Constructing such a vast museum in one of the world's most ancient cities was not an easy task.

Almost as soon as workers began digging at the site, a settlement from the 5th century was uncovered, forcing contractors to call in archaeologists.

Rather than re-locate the museum, the architectural team decided to build the modern steel and glass structure on concrete stilts above the archaeological diggings.

The government is hoping to attract 2,500 visitors during the first three days after the opening.


 

Read more:

"No invite for Lord Elgin heirs as New Acropolis Museum opens (Feature) - Monsters and Critics" -

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/features/article_1478558.php/No_invite_for_Lord_Elgin_heirs_as_New_Acropolis_Museum_opens__Feature__#ixzz0G8qWmCLY&A
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« Reply #37 on: June 03, 2009, 12:31:04 pm »











                                                          Eight Reasons:



                             Why the Parthenon Sculptures must be returned to Greece






Nicolas Mottas
The LosAngeles Times
February 23, 2009

The date has been announced. On June 20th, the New Acropolis Museum of Athens will be inaugurated, opening its gates to the public. Crouching at the foot of the Acropolis rock, the brand new Museum is consisting the forefront of Greece's continual effort for the restoration of the Parthenon Marbles. The opening of the 130 million Euro ultra-modern building, which covers almost 14,000 square meters of exchibition space, dismantles the years-long argument that there isn't a proper place to host the ancient Sculptures in Athens. But, actually, the new Museum isn't the only reason which advocates in favour of Parthenon's Sculptures back to Greece - there are, at least, seven more points:

1. Lord Elgin action's illegality: Thomas Bruce, then British ambassador in Istanbul, did not have the legal right to remove (in 1801) the ancient masterpieces from the Parthenon. Officially, Elgin obtained a 'firman' from the Ottoman authorities but when the British Parliament asked to examine it, he couldn't submit it. What he submitted was an italian translation of the official document. I reproduce from an interesting article of the American Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures, Inc: "Specialists in Ottoman Law point out that the document does not carry the signature and seal of the Sultan or his customary invocation to God, and without them, Elgin and by extention the British Museum have no legal evidence of ownership of the Parthenon Sculptures" (Newsletter, Nov.2008).

Therefore, the argument of the British Museum's administrations that the Sculptures consist "legal property of the museum" is doubted. How proper is to base the 'legality' of Parthenon Marbles' ownership on a translated version of a letter probably produced by a low-ranked Ottoman official?

2. The precedent cases of artifacts restitution: Two years ago, the Los Angeles-based J.Paul Getty Museum returned to Greece a 4th century BC Macedonian gold wreath as well as a 6th century BC marble statue of a woman; eight years ago, in 2001, the same museum had handed back to Italy almost 500 ancient objects. Going back three years ago, in September 2006, the Heidelberg University of Germany handed over to Greece a small piece of Parthenon's north frieze.

In 2008 the Vatican decided to give back a Parthenon fragment, while on the same year a British court ordered the return of a Byzantine icon which had been stolen 30 years ago from a Greek monastery. Furthermore, during last September, in a gesture of meritorious goodwill Italy gave back to Greece a fragment of the Sculptures which had been acquired by a museum in Palermo, Sicily; its worthy of remark that the Italian President Giorgio Napolitano personally presented the restored fragment to his Greek counterpart Karolos Papoulias.

3. Complete view of Parthenon: Almost 99% of what survives of Parthenon's masterpieces is exposed in London and Athens According to Professor A.M Snodgrass of Cambridge University, "among these pieces, the British Museum possesses fifty-five of the fifty-six frieze slabs, all twenty of, the pediment figures and fifteen of the sixteen metopes, nearly 98% in total" (Appendix B, British Committee's submission to the Select Committee of the House of Commons). But the removed Marbles consist core part of the whole architectural environment of the Acropolis and their position is in sight of the building to which they actually belong and not in the hall of a museum in the other side of Europe. As Professor Snodgrass writes "if the aim is to investigate the meaning attached to the original design as a whole, it would be a huge gain to have virtually all the surviving material in one location" - that location is the New Acropolis Museum, in the shaddow of the Parthenon.

The visitor in the renowned British Museum sees some random parts of the Parthenon, along with other ancient masterpieces of other civilizations and historical periods. But if the Sculptures will be exhibited in the modern Acropolis Museum, the visitor will have the great opportunity to appreciate them in their original environment, in sight of the Parthenon and very close to other known ancient Athenian sites (e.g. ancient market, Olympic Zeus Temple etc).



4. A UNESCO World Heritage Site dismembered: The Acropolis' Parthenon consists a unique case of a crudely dismembered ancient building. What Lord Elgin did in the start of the 19th Century was an action of disgrace, against a monument which stances a landmark of Western Civilization. Because the actual meaning of Parthenon's appreciation is in its unique universal value as a great symbol of Democracy - therefore, a gesture of respect which would cancel Elgin's irreverent act would be the restoration of the removed artifacts and the reunification of the twenty-four centuries old monument.

5. Public Opinion's stance: If the restitution of the Marbles was fully dependent on what people think, then the British Museum should have handed them back to Greece. According to a poll conducted during 2008 by the British Ipsos-Mori firm (2,109 persons in 198 UK locations), 69% of those who were familiar with the issue were in favour of Sculptures' restitution to Greece, while only 13% expressed opposition. In comparison with a poll conducted in 2002, there is a 7% increase in the number of the British people who support the Marbles' restoration.

Previous polls, conducted in the United Kingdom during the 90s, had similar results, proving that the majority of Britons (who are familiar with the issue) are in favour of Sculptures' restitution.

6. International Pressure: The campaign for the restoration of the ancient masterpieces back to Greece has gained international recognition. From Australia to the United States, significant celebrities from the political and cultural scene, as well as distinguished scholars, have favoured the Parthenon Sculptures' Restitution. International organizations such as the European Parliament and UNESCO have formally supported that aim, while politicians from various countries have expressed their keen interest towards the reunification of the Parthenon.

For example, in the UK, the late Robin Cook, MP and Secretary of State (1997-2001), was in favour of Sculpture's restoration. The former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, had said that the Marbles "should return home once there is a proper place for them there", while the Labour Euro-MP Alfred Lomas has repeatedly urged the British government to take positive initiatives on the issue. Moreover, in 2000, U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois introduced a resolution (S.Con.Res 127) in which he expressed the "sense of the Congress that the Parthenon Marbles should be returned to Greece".

7. A European Cultural Heritage Issue: Except from a bilateral issue between Greece and the United Kingdom, the case of Parthenon's reunification is a matter of E.U.'s common Cultural Heritage. On January 1999, the European Parliament adopted a declaration in which it assured its support "for the return of the Elgin marbles to Greece, reflecting the view held by the majority of the British public on this matter and international instruments designating the Parthenon a world cultural heritage site".

8. According to Professor Francesco Buranelli, the head of the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Heritage (Vatican), Lord Elgin's act "left a deep wound in European cultural sensitivity". That needed sensitivity on Europe's Cultural Heritage is mentioned in Article 151 of the E.U. Treaty, which stipulates that the Community must support and supplement action by the Member States in order to conserve and safeguard cultural heritage of European significance. The Athens Parthenon is definitely Europe's landmark monument, epitomizing its historical, political and cultural roots.
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« Reply #38 on: June 11, 2009, 08:01:34 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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« Reply #39 on: June 11, 2009, 08:02:47 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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« Reply #40 on: June 11, 2009, 08:03:56 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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« Reply #41 on: June 11, 2009, 08:05:13 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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« Reply #42 on: June 11, 2009, 08:09:33 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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« Reply #43 on: June 11, 2009, 08:20:22 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 #44 on: June 13, 2009, 11:49:26 am »











                                                 Greece 'would refuse Marble loan' 






BBC NEWS
June 13, 2009
 
The Marbles have been on display at the British Museum since 1817

Greece would not accept a short loan of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum as it would "legalise their snatching", the Culture Minister said.

Antonis Samaras said any loan would mean renouncing Greece's claim to the 2,500-year-old sculptures.

The Marbles, also known as the Elgin Marbles, have been in London since they were sold to the museum in 1817.

Greece hopes one day to display the collection in the Acropolis Museum, which opens in Athens next weekend.

The Marbles originally decorated the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis of Athens.

A large proportion of the surviving sculptures were removed from the Acropolis in the early 19th century on the orders of British aristocrat Lord Elgin, who later sold them to the British Museum.

The museum holds 75 metres of the original 160 metres of the frieze that ran round the inner core of the building.

Of the surviving items some 90 are in London and 97 in Athens. In many cases, part of a figure is in London, and part in Athens.



Copies of those held in London have been made for the new Acropolis museum
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