Edward Enfield is to give a talk about the Parthenon Marbles at this year’s World Travel Market, at Excel in London.

The Greek National Tourist Organisation in conjunction with the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles invite you to hear Edward Enfield speak at Excel, for this year’s World Travel Market

ACROPOLIS Now – Greece’s latest cultural offering
The presentation will take place at the Platinum Suite 5, on Wednesday 12th of November, at 11:30 hours.

Almost anyone who has seen the New Acropolis Museum, now believes that its opening will represent the start of a significant new chapter in the campaign for reunification of all the surviving Parthenon Sculptures in Athens.

From:
The Times

From Times Online
October 14, 2008
Inside the New Acropolis Museum
Athens finally has a suitable home for the Parthenon sculptures and – British marbles or not – you should go, says Ginny McGrath

The opening of the New Acropolis Museum will almost certainly reignite the debate over the Elgin Marbles.

The museum, which is expected to open in early 2009 after 30 years in conception, has even reserved a space for the missing sculptures in optimistic anticipation of their return.
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A rather late piece from the BBC on the return of the Palermo fragment of the Parthenon Sculptures to Greece.

From:
BBC News

Saturday, 4 October 2008
Italy returns Parthenon fragment

Italy’s president has returned a piece of the frieze from the Parthenon temple to Greece after some 200 years.

President Giorgio Napolitano said the move was part of a campaign to restore artefacts “torn from their context”.
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A press release from the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles following the return of the Palermo fragment of the Parthenon Sculptures earlier this week.

From:
British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles

Press Release
The British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles welcomes the return of the ‘Palermo fragment’ to Athens

YESTERDAY 24 September 2008, the President of the Italian Republic, on a state visit to Greece, brought with him, to present to his Greek counterpart, the ‘Palermo fragment’ from Slab VI of the East Frieze of the Parthenon on the Acropolis at Athens. It had spent more than two hundred years in Sicily, after being acquired by a British consul and passed on to the Salinas Museum in Palermo. It portrays, in exquisite detail, the draped lower leg, ankle and foot of a seated goddess, probably Artemis. It will immediately take its place in an inaugural exhibition of returned artefacts, at the brilliantly-designed New Acropolis Museum.
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Following the Athens UNESCO conference, Tom Flynn has concluded that litigation may be the only way to make the British Museum take the Parthenon Marbles issue seriously. This echoes the view of various other comentators who have been observing other similar (but successful) cases that have occurred in recent years.

From:
Artknows

Tuesday, April 1, 2008
The Parthenon Marbles: Time to litigate?

The case of the Parthenon Marbles has been simmering away for decades. Every now and then an event occurs which prompts the Greeks to half-heartedly drag it forward onto the media front burner. For a few weeks everyone watches it let off steam until it gradually slides onto the back burner again.

The last time the Marbles issue moved up the news agenda was in 2003, just prior to the Olympic Games in Athens. But thanks to British Museum intransigence (it was also the BM’s 250th anniversary) the Greek appeals came to nothing. Now the temperature has risen once again due to the planned opening later this year (or more likely early next) of the new €94 million Bernard Tschumi-designed Acropolis Museum.
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Graham Binns, who in recent years was well known as the head of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles has sadly died at the age of seventy-seven.

From:
The Times

May 22, 2003
Graham Binns

Promoter of the arts and of commercial radio, who campaigned for the Elgin Marbles to go back to Greece
From 1997 until 2002 Graham Binns was the chairman of the British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles. He was one of the committee’s first members, and was thrilled by the latest design for the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, where the Greek Government wishes to place the unified Marbles.

When the committee was first established, many thought its aim eccentric, but Binns was never deterred by the hostility which the views of the committee frequently met. He often conducted conversations through the letters columns of the broadsheet papers. In correspondence in The Times last year, he wrote: “If the British Museum ‘transcends national boundaries’, it makes sense to bring all the pieces relating to the Parthenon together in a purpose-built museum next to the monument where, indeed, they can be under the British Museum’s ownership and auspices. Things move on.”
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