Italy has opened the way back to Greece of the Marbles of the Parthenon.
The Archaeological Museum Salinas de Palermo will yield to the Acropolis Museum of Athens a piece of the frieze that represents the goddesses Peitho or Artemis, for an initial period of four years and, possibly, in an indefinite way, by virtue of an agreement whose wave
Expansive has reached London.
The ball is now on the roof of the British Museum, subjected to an unprecedented pressure for the return of those known as elgin marbles, in honor of the diplomat who took up to the United Kingdom 75 meters from the Parthenon frieze in a controversial
Expedition of the nineteenth century questioned in his day as an expoliation by Lord Byron himself.
Boris Johnson himself wrote an article in 1986 in the magazine debate criticizing how sculptures were “sawed and pirated” of the Greek temple.
Johnson proposed and then that the marbles will leave “this northern culture and whiskey amateur” and were returned “the country of the Sun and the Achilles landscape to which they belong».
The then young conservative student -devote of the classic culture in his passage by Oxford – was more or less in tune with the Labor Premier Neil Kinnock, which already in 1984 made the futile promise to return the precious treasure to Greece with an argument: ”
The Parthenon, without marbles, is like a smile that several teeth lacks. ”
The times have changed, and Boris Johnson now alleges that the United Kingdom is the “legitimate owner” of the Meetopas and the sculptures that constituted half of the decorative elements that were standing on the Parthenon when Thomas Bruce, seventh EGIN Count, used
Its argues to convince the authorities of the Ottoman Empire that the marbles would be better preserved elsewhere.
Contradicting his own words at the time of student (rescued the trunk of memories by the Greek newspaper Ta Nea), Boris Johnson now launches benches out.
The future of Elgin’s marbles, in his opinion, must decide it on the Broitnic Museum, chaired since last year by its CORRIGNERIRE and former Secretary of Treasury George Osborne.
The director of the museum, the German Hartwig Fischer, argues that the ideal location of the marbles is the current one, “at the intersection of the cultures of the world and through time.”
During the confinement of the Covid, with the partial closure of the British, the controversy was on the eaves.
But with the reopening of the Greek galleries and the new exhibition of the marbles, last November, the Government of Athens returned to the load as never before since the time of Melina Mercouri as a minister of culture.
The offensive departed in November of Greek Prime Minister Kyriacos Mitsotakis.
“It is essential that the marbles of the Parthenon in London meet with most sculptures in Athens,” he said.
And he placed the opening of negotiations to Johnson, supported by the recent decision of a UNESCO committee that considers the refund of sculptures such as “an intergovernmental issue”.
The actress Janet Suzman, at the forefront of the British Committee for the reunification of the Marbles of the Parthenon, has asked the Government of Johnson to follow the road marked throughout 2021 by Germany, Belgium or France, with the return of plundered pieces in
Its colonies, including Benin bronzes.
In the recent case of Italy, the initiative has seen directly from the Salinas Regional Museum of Palermo, which acquired the fragment of the acropolis frieze to 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 Amendment) but of a high symbolic value,” said the director of the Italian Museum, Alberto Samonà.
“It is an answer to the international debate, but it is also a gesture of friendship between Greece and Sicily, who share a common history in the Mediterranean.”
