British Museum Proposes “Parthenon Partnership” with Greece over Contested Marbles
Jonathan Williams, deputy director of London’s British Museum, has prompt a plan for repatriating the Parthenon marbles to Greece, based on The Guardian. Loosely termed the “Parthenon partnership,” the scheme requires Greek authorities and British Museum officers to conform to a program of lending and borrowing the objects—fifteen metopes, seventeen figural sculptures, and a portion of a frieze that graced the two,500-year-old Parthenon temple on the Acropolis earlier than being eliminated to the UK by Lord Elgin, then the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, early within the nineteenth century.
The repatriation of the marbles has been actively sought by Greece since 1983. The UK has for many years dragged its heels in returning the objects, citing the so-called Bloomsbury protection in its effort to retain possession of the sculptures, claiming that the objects are owned by the British Museum and thus not topic to authorities oversight. Museum authorities have maintained that the marbles have been legally acquired at a time when Greece was underneath Ottoman rule. In Could, the governments of the 2 international locations agreed to carry formal talks relating to the repatriation.
“What we’re calling for is an energetic ‘Parthenon partnership’ with our pals and colleagues in Greece,” Williams informed the Sunday Occasions Tradition journal. “I firmly imagine there’s house for a extremely dynamic and constructive dialog inside which new methods of working collectively will be discovered.”
Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who has publicly referred to as for the repatriation of the marbles on quite a few events, had beforehand prompt this system of borrowing and lending between the UK and Greece. Noting that the British Museum “hoped to vary the temperature of the talk,” which has at occasions been fairly heated, Williams expressed amenability to the likelihood. “There are various fantastic issues we’d be delighted to borrow and lend,” he mentioned. “It’s what we do.”
Nikolaos Stampolidis, the Acropolis Museum’s director, prompt the plan could possibly be a “foundation for constructive talks,” including, “Within the tough days we live in, returning them can be an act of historical past. It might be as if the British have been restoring democracy itself.”
