Another restitution story, only tenuously connected to that of the Parthenon Marbles via the Elgin name – but interesting none the less.

From:
Vancouver Sun

Statuette returned, but was it stolen?
Note says it was taken 50 years ago, although archives uncertain they ever owned it
By Ari Altstedter, Postmedia News June 7, 2011

Someone entered the first-floor men’s room of the Lord Elgin Hotel in downtown Ottawa on Saturday, carefully placing a shopping bag on the floor and leaving.

Inside was a century-old bronze statuette and an anonymous typed note.
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Janet Munsil’s play about the Elgin Marbles is showing again in Canada.

From:
Times Colonist (Canada)

Theatre Review: Stolen Greek sculptures inspire play
By Adrian Chamberlain, Times Colonist March 6, 2011
What: Influence
Where: Metro Studio
When: To March 13
Rating: 3 1/2

No wonder Athena seems choked.

The citizens of Athens built the Parthenon in the goddess’s honour. So when Lord Elgin pilfered the sculptures from the Parthenon in the early 19th century, she took it as a personal affront.

An enraged Athena storms the stage in Influence, a 2008 play by Victoria’s Janet Munsil, now undergoing its second production. Set in the British Museum in 1817, where the marbles are newly installed, she is joined by fellow Greek gods Apollo and Hephaestus. The mortals are the poet John Keats and the English painter Benjamin Haydon, a lesser-known figure.
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More coverage of the controversy over the locations of the busts of the Eighth Earl of Elgin and his wife in Canada.

From:
The Herald (Scotland)

Elgin marble row with a difference as Canadian hotel seeks return of busts
MARTIN WILLIAMS
22 Feb 2011

IT sometimes seems that anything linked to the Elgin dynasty and made of marble is bound to become shrouded in controversy.

The long-running row between London and Athens is rumbling on over the sculptures known as the Parthenon Marbles, which were taken from the Acropolis.
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It is hard to tell, whether everything that the Elgin family were involved in had a tendency to generate controversy – or whether the controversies are always mentioned, because it is easy for writers to attempt to draw parallels to the story of the Parthenon Marbles

From:
Ottawa Citizen

Our Elgin Marbles
Sculptures of Lord and Lady Elgin have moved from hotel to Rideau Hall
By Tony Lofaro, The Ottawa Citizen February 20, 2011

OTTAWA — What is the rightful home of Ottawa’s marble busts of Lord and Lady Elgin? The answer is a compelling tale about an Ottawa landmark, a noble Scottish family and a government that appears to value fine print over tradition.

Since 2003, the busts of the eighth earl of Elgin, an influential governor general of Canada, and his wife, Lady Mary Lambton, have been at Rideau Hall. Before that they were displayed prominently in the lobby of the Lord Elgin Hotel, and had been there since prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King unveiled them at the hotel’s opening on a Saturday afternoon in July 1941.
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A play on in Victoria, British Columbia, is set during the arrival of the Parthenon Marbles in Britain in 1817, when a young John Keats visits them for the first time.

Intrepid Theatre presents:
‘Influence’
by Janet Munsil

March 4-5 & March 9-12, 8pm
Sunday Matinees + talkback: March 6 + 13, 2 pm
At the Metro Studio (Quadra at Johnson), Victoria BC
TICKETS $25: www.intrepidtheatre.com or call 250 590 6291

“A winner. . .I can’t wait for the day that Janet Munsil’s Influence will extend across the seas to be presented where it’s set, in London.” Vancouver Sun

Audiences in Victoria, BC will get a rare chance to see internationally renowned Victoria playwright Janet Munsil’s latest work, Influence, when the play makes its Victoria premiere at the Metro Studio in March.
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A Canadian birchbark canoe dating to the eighteenth century, that was unexpectedly discovered in Cornwall will be returned to Canada. It is thought to be the oldest surviving example of its type. Unusually, the documentation from its acquisition is surprisingly clear & detailed, giving more information about the provenance of it.

From:
Canada.com

Birchbark canoe from 18th century returning to Canada.
By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News December 27, 2010

It’s being described as the world’s oldest canoe, a one-of-a-kind relic from 18th-century Canada rediscovered in a storage shed in Britain and bound for repatriation to this country next year.

Earlier this month, the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall announced the “incredible find” at an estate in Penryn, England. Curators said the canoe – found in two pieces but remarkably well preserved given the passage of time – would be stabilized by conservators and exhibited in the U.K. before shipment overseas for permanent display at the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ont.
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In a very interesting followup to the amusing story of Lord Elgin’s rocks, on display in the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the current Lord Elgin has given an interview about why he made the decision to return the rocks, along with various other items to Canada.

Most telling is the quote near the end of the video:

It was a pity I felt, that people in Canada were not able to see them & touch them & so on & only hear about them.
There came a moment that there was a place that they could go to, where they would become, as they were in our house a part of our family, they were going to go back to be part of the family that was Canada.

Surely the same now applies to Greece since the building of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens?

As I’ve said before, one wonders whether the Elgin Marbles would already be back in Greece if the Seventh Earl of Elgin hadn’t been forced to sell them when faced with bankruptcy?

This story reads almost like a peculiar parody of the Parthenon Marbles… The Eighth Earl of Elgin (son of the Seventh Earl who removed the sculptures from the Parthenon) was at one time governor of Canada (when he wasn’t ransacking the Summer Palace in Beijing). During his time there, rocks got thrown at him during a riot, that he later brought back to his family home in Scotland as a souvenir of the experience. A few years ago, the Elgin family then decided to return Elgin’s rocks(as they became known), so that they could go on display in Canada as they were a part of Canada’s history.

One wonders, if Elgin had not faced financial insolvency & been forced to sell the Parthenon Sculptures, would his family have taken a more enlightened approach to the British Museum & returned the sculptures to Greece already?

From:
Edmonton Journal

History museum offers new narrative of Confederation
By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News October 28, 2010

Canada’s main history museum has unveiled a new exhibit casting the country’s Confederation story in a fresh light emphasizing the tensions that threatened to pull British North America apart in the years leading up to 1867′s unification project.

It’s a rewriting of the narrative of the country’s birth, says Canadian Museum of Civilization president Victor Rabinovitch, that doesn’t follow “the usual line about how peaceful everything was up here.”
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The Haida in Canada have secured the return of ancestral remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which will now be reburied. The handover of the human remains follows extensive negotiations that began in 1996.

From:
QCI Observer

Reburial scheduled for Thursday
August 4, 2010 12:24 PM

A Haida ancestor whose remains have been in England for more than 100 years is on his way home.

The remains were collected by Reverend Charles Harrison from the Masset area and have been held in the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University for many years. Rev. Harrison first came to the islands in 1882.
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Michaelle Jean, Canada’s Governor General plans to make a visit to the New Acropolis Museum during a trip to Athens.

From:
Athens News Agency

11/02/2009
Canada’s Gov. General in Olympia

The Governor General of Canada, Michaelle Jean, on Friday evening visited the “Art Matters” forum in Athens along with her Canadian filmmaker husband Jean-Daniel Lafond, with the focus on possible film co-productions between Greece and Canada as well as international film festivals.

Jean and her husband were welcomed to the forum — which was created by Lafond — by the president of the Greek Film Centre Giorgos Papalios.
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More coverage of the controversy surrounding the exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Royal Ontario Museum.

From:
Forward – The Jewish Daily

Furor Over Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibition
By Michael Kaminer
Published July 15, 2009, issue of July 24, 2009.

Toronto — Crowds at the Royal Ontario Museum’s heavily hyped Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition — Dead Sea Scrolls: Words That Changed the World, which runs until January 3, 2010 — have far exceeded the museum’s own expectations. In the show’s first nine days, more than 18,000 people flocked to the museum’s spectacular new Daniel Libeskind-designed Michael Lee-Chin Crystal pavilion — about 52% above the exhibitors’ own projections.

But hosannas for the showing, featuring four scroll fragments on loan from the Israel Antiquities Authority and displayed in public for the first time, have not been universal. Last April, the Palestinian Authority appealed to Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, to cancel the show, citing international conventions that make it illegal for a government agency to take archaeological artifacts from a territory that its country occupies.
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The Dead Sea Scrolls are on display in the Royal Ontario Museum – this is not without controversy though, as Palestinian Groups claim state that these artefacts come from the occupied territories.

In many ways, this is a case that could be solved easily – the issue is that the true reasons behind various aspects of the recent history of the scrolls are not ignored – but the museum is ignoring these problems for fear of upsetting other people (by stating the truth rater than ignoring it).

From:
Independent

Robert Fisk’s World: You won’t find any lessons in unity in the Dead Sea Scrolls
I looked at the texts in Toronto – a tale that was bound to pose a series of questions

Saturday, 11 July 2009

At last, I have seen the Dead Sea Scrolls. There they were, under their protective, cool-heated screens, the very words penned on to leather and papyrus 2,000 years ago, the world’s most significant record of the Old Testament.

I guess you’ve got to see it to believe it. I can’t read Hebrew – let alone ancient Hebrew (or Greek or Aramaic, the other languages of the scrolls) – but some of the letters are familiar to me from Arabic. The “seen” (s) of Arabic, and the “meem” (m) are almost the same as Hebrew and there they were, set down by some ancient who knew, as we do, only the past and nothing of the future. Most of the texts are in the Bible; several are not. “May God most high bless you, may he show you his face and may he open for you,” it is written on the parchments. “For he will honour the pious upon the throne of an eternal kingdom.”
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