The poll I mentioned last week in the Guardian [1] has closed now & the results have been published.
Whichever way you look at it it shows a resounding level of support for re reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures.
This website also gets a mention – so quite a few people must have followed the link from it & voted. I’m not sure that I’d describe this site as Elginist – more anti-Elginist.
From:
Guardian [2]
How G2’s Parthenon marbles poll went global
Aida Edemariam
Wednesday 8 July 2009Best-read lists on websites are disconcertingly revealing things. In a week where the Guardian’s list might have been dominated by, say, Michael Jackson’s demise or the demonstrations in Iran, one small element of our arts coverage persistently ranked in the top-two best-read pieces on the site: a poll that asked, simply, “Is it time to return the Parthenon marbles?” No fewer than 380,000 people clicked on it, and an unprecedented 129,974 felt strongly enough to vote – an overwhelming 94.8% voting yes, and a puny 5.2% voting no.
Now, the Parthenon marbles aren’t exactly breaking news: Lord Elgin began removing them from Greece in 1801. True, the new Parthenon museum had just opened, with its pointed gaps where the missing marbles ought to go – but still. The opening of even the snazziest of museums can’t usually compete with one of the biggest celebrity exits in the obituaries calendar. Or the biggest demonstration in Iran since the fall of the Shah.
In short, it went viral. It appeared on Flickr, on digg, on twitpic (a picture-sharing version of Twitter), on Greek tourist websites, on a Christian forum and on dedicated Elginist sites such as Elginism.com. Some 6,000 page views were generated by the passing on of just one email link. But by far the largest number – 40,000 – came from Facebook, where various campaigns steered viewers towards doing the right thing.Most respondents were, unsurprisingly, Greek: Greece usually accounts for 0.4% of the Guardian’s monthly traffic, but more than half of respondents to the poll were from Athens (second place went to London, at 6%. That’s how much we care). The Athenian respondents felt so strongly about exercising their democratic rights that they visited the page an average of twice each. They did invent the concept, after all.