June 15, 2008

Stelios makes a new effort to reunite the Parthenon Marbles

Posted at 10:11 am in Elgin Marbles

Following the support of a Cambridge Union debate & then the branding of easyCruise’s new ship with Reunite the Parthenon Marbles, Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou has moved onto the next stage of his plan – a series of adverts in the British Press to increase awareness of the issue. One hopes that this plan will end up as successful as his previous businesses have been.

From:
The Independent

Stelios in bid to reunite Elgin Marbles
By Arifa Akbar, Arts Correspondent
Saturday, 14 June 2008

Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of the budget airline easyJet, is due to launch a one-man campaign to reunite the Elgin Marbles by taking out a series of full-page advertisements in national newspapers across Britain next week.

The Greek businessman has written an open letter to the British Museum in London and the new Acropolis Museum in Athens. In it, he urges the institutions to reunite the Elgin – also known as the Parthenon – Marbles that are currently divided between Greece and Britain.

In an ad to be published on Monday, he writes: “I think the time has come for the curators of the two museums to have a constructive dialogue … Away from the politics and name-calling, I feel there is now a win-win solution for both museums in the form of a cultural exchange. Therefore, art lovers worldwide might get the once-in-a-lifetime chance to see these masterpieces reunited.”

In the final line of the letter, he mentions a campaign that he plans to launch this summer. A ship, emblazoned with with the slogan “Reunite the Parthenon Marbles”, will sail around the Greek islands .

Some of the Marbles, which once adorned the Acropolis in Athens, were removed by Lord Elgin, Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

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1 Comment »

  1. Tom Minogue said,

    07.03.08 at 7:02 pm

    NEWS that the multi-millionaire founder of EasyJet, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, is set to launch a personal campaign for the reuniting of the Elgin marbles by placing adverts in newspapers is interesting, but hardly a new idea (‘EasyJet founder gets Elgin marbles campaign rolling’, June 15).

    Various bodies have diplomatically campaigned for years to have the Parthenon Marbles reunited with the Parthenon. These diplomatic attempts have all ended in failure and much as I admire Stelios for trying, I fear his attempts will share the same fate.

    Most well-meaning people or groups trying to engineer a return of the Parthenon Marbles seem to forget that they were stolen in the first place by the British ambassador who then lied to Parliament about the theft.

    The downright lies and theft by our ambassador can not be dealt with diplomatically – would we negotiate with a burglar who had stolen from our house for a temporary return of our belongings? The matter of the looting of these treasures from a country under occupation should be dealt with by the courts in a similar manner to Nazi booty.

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