After agreeing to host an exhibition on the return of the Parthenon Marbles, a Liverpool Gallery has been hit by a storm of protests claiming that they should not be expressing their support for the issue.

From:
IC Liverpool

News
Marbles row hits gallery
Jan 28 2004
By Mark Hookham, Daily Post

THE Walker art gallery was at the centre of a political storm last night after agreeing to host the launch of a campaign to strip the British Museum of the Elgin Marbles.

The great-great-grandson of Lord Elgin last night said it was “monstrous” for the gallery to host the launch of the Marbles Reunited campaign in the North West.
Read the rest of this entry »

There have been a wide range of responses to letters in The Times about the Elgin Marbles a few days ago.

From:
The Times

Debate
January 28, 2004

Playing marbles
Can the row over ownership of the Parthenon sculptures ever be resolved?
YOUR debate about the Elgin Marbles (January 20) makes depressing reading. The same old arguments repeated on both sides, and no hint of compromise offered or accepted. It must be time, for the sake of the friendship which ought to exist between the Greeks and the British, to seek a solution to this corrosive quarrel.

My solution would be that we give the Duveen Gallery and the land it stands on to Greece, and we lend them the Marbles for as long as they keep them in the gallery.
Read the rest of this entry »

Responses to some of the press coverage of the launch of the Marbles Reunited campaign.

From:
The Times

January 25, 2004
Letters to the Editor: Riddle of the Elgin marbles

YOUR articles, Public shows huge support for return of Elgin marbles and Oi, hands off our marbles! (News, January 11 and News Review, last week), raised some controversial points. The British Museum’s claim to legal ownership of the marbles “because it paid for them in the 19th century” is incorrect. The marbles were purchased in 1816 by the government of the day, with £35,000 of public money, and vested in the British Museum.

The claim that the British Museum “has never had a formal written request for the marbles’ return” may well be true — but British governments over the years have certainly had formal requests from Greece.
Read the rest of this entry »

Other museums can return artefacts because it is the right thing to do. Could the British Museum not repatriate the Elgin Marbles for the same reason?

From:
Norwich Bulletin

Opinion – Friday, January 23, 2004
Norwich knows to tell British: Return statues
‘Context’ matters here, in Athens
OUR VIEW

Slater Museum director Vivian Zoe was at Mohegan Sun Thursday to witness the “repatriation” of Native American artifacts originally unearthed at Fort Shantok, where Uncas’ warriors successfully defended the tribe against the Narragansetts in the 17th Century.

Over the centuries, the artifacts had been scattered hither, thither and yon. These ones in particular were returned by the Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington, Litchfield County.
Read the rest of this entry »

Despite Melina Mercouri’s death in 1994, the battle for the return of the Parthenon Sculptures that she spearheaded continues.

From:
Kathimerini (English edition)

Saturday January 24, 2004
Battle for Mercouri’s dream still going strong
Melina Mercouri, who pursued her vision of the return of the Parthenon Marbles as culture minister from Oct. 1981 till she died in March 1994.
HELBI

The loneliness of the Marbles continues, despite regular articles in the British press, a few of them favoring their return but most against it. Greek Foreign Minister and prospective PASOK President George Papandreou was to have discussed the return of the Parthenon Marbles during his visit to London, but all his counterpart Jack Straw would state publicly was, “There is a legal issue that must be studied.” British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who received Papandreou at 10 Downing Street, deftly skirted the obstacle and referred the issue to a meeting between Culture Minister Evangelos Venizelos and his British counterpart Tessa Jowell. More of the same, in other words. Read the rest of this entry »

The Greek government today made new calls for the Parthenon Marbles to be returned to Athens.

From:
The Times

January 23, 2004
Athens calls for classical antiquities exchange
By Richard Beeston, Diplomatic Editor

THE GREEK Government yesterday made an impassioned appeal for the return of the Elgin Marbles, arguing that a compromise deal in the year of the Athens Olympics could benefit Britain and Greece.

George Papandreou, the Greek Foreign Minister who will lead the ruling Pasok party into general elections in March, proposed that the antiquities remain the property of the British Museum, but on permanent loan at an annex near the Acropolis.
Read the rest of this entry »

The British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, says that the best way forward to resolve the dispute over the Elgin Marbles is to enter into direct talks with the Greek Government. This is a very positive step – negotiations are the way forward, rather than ignoring the issue as has generally been the place in the past.

From:
BBC News

Last Updated: Thursday, 22 January, 2004, 15:36 GMT
Talks planned over Elgin Marbles
The UK and Greece are to hold talks on the Parthenon sculptures, hundreds of which were cut from the temple by Lord Elgin and sold to the British Museum

“The best way of taking this forward is by way of discussions between the two cultural ministers,” Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said.
Read the rest of this entry »

Removing the issue of ownership & curatorship takes away one leg of the British Museum’s (already weak) arguments justifying their continued retention of the Elgin Marbles.

From:
Reuters

Greece Seeks to Woo Marbles from British Museum
Thu January 22, 2004 03:48 PM ET
By Karolos Grohmann

LONDON (Reuters) – Greece, seeking to woo the British Museum into sending the disputed Elgin Marbles to Athens for this summer’s Olympic Games, said Thursday the reluctant museum could use part of a new Athens site as its own branch.

“This can become a win-win situation for all of us, both for the British Museum as well as for the new Acropolis Museum,” Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou said in London.
Read the rest of this entry »

This article seems to dwell too much on the effort Elgin made to remove the marbles from Athens, rather than the simpler (& more relevant question) of what is the right thing to do now.

From:
Daily Telegraph

This marbles madness
(Filed: 21/01/2004)

A new bid to return the Elgin marbles to Greece is ill-informed and has appalling implications for all our museums, says Richard Dorment

Anyone can understand why a patriotic Greek might want the Elgin marbles returned to Athens. It is a harder to fathom the motivation of British supporters of what, on the face of it, is a hopeless cause.
Read the rest of this entry »

Greece wants the Parthenon Sculptures returned to Athens in time for the Olympics later this year. They are stepping up their campaigning to try & make sure that this happens.

From:
ABC News (Australia)

Greece wants Elgin Marbles returned in time for Olympics
The World Today – Tuesday, 20 January , 2004 12:54:00
Reporter: Fran Kelly

PETER CAVE: Greece appears to have won over the British public in its latest bid to have the Elgin marbles returned in time for the Olympics this year, to Athens.

Polling shows three out of four Britons believe that the priceless Greek antiquities ripped from the Parthenon by a former British Ambassador to Constantinople at the start of the 19th century should be returned to Greece.
Read the rest of this entry »

The recent launch of the Marbles Reunited campaign & the flood of editorial pieces following it has stirred up controversy in the letters pages of many newspapers.

From:
The Times

January 20, 2004
Who owns the Elgin Marbles?

The present Lord Elgin says that Greece cannot be trusted to look after the Marbles. Should we keep them?
THE question conjures up Lord Elgin, from an era of privileged appropriation, versus the Greek nation, natural guardians of aboriginal Western civilisation, in unseemly dispute over the toy cupboard: no surprise that polls indicate popular support for sending back the sculptures. Yet, of course, it’s not that simple. Both sides claim moral and legal priority (hardly surprising, given the ill-recorded and disputatious circumstances of what occurred in Athens two centuries ago). Yet history does not help. We should instead be asking ourselves, what do we really care about now?

Who cares about ancient art or archaeology? Not, apparently, the Greek Government, for whom it is more important to build an empty museum to house the sculptures than it is to recover evidence that could have furthered understanding of the people who created the Parthenon, which was destroyed when the museum was built.
Read the rest of this entry »

According to this piece, returning the Parthenon Sculptures would mean the re-writing of European History. Surely though, another way of seeing the process is that it is merely adding a new chapter to their existing history – a change in decision due to evolving philosophies in an ever changing world?

From:
The Guardian

Comment
History in the making
Returning the Elgin marbles to Greece would mean whitewashing Europe’s past
Salvatore Settis
Monday January 19, 2004
The Guardian

It took a consummate actress like Melina Mercouri to realise that archaeology has a part to play in politics. As Greece’s minister of culture in the 1980s, she launched a vibrato appeal to the British Museum for the return of the Parthenon, or “Elgin”, marbles. Similar requests had been put forward since the dawn of Greek independence in 1835, but the issue gained real resonance after Mercouri’s appeal.
Read the rest of this entry »