The grand inauguration event for the New Acropolis Museum has finally taken place, so now the general public will be allowed admission to the building to see it in its completed state for the first time.

From:
Associated Press

New Acropolis Museum opens with lavish party
By NICHOLAS PAPHITIS

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Gods, heroes and long-dead mortals stepped off their plinths into the evening sky of Athens on Saturday during the lavish launch of the new Acropolis Museum, a decades-old dream that Greece hopes will also help reclaim a cherished part of its heritage from Britain.

The digital animated display on the museum walls ended years of delays and wrangling over the ultramodern building, set among apartment blocks and elegant neoclassical houses at the foot of the Acropolis hill.
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The Big Question this morning covered the topic of the Elgin Marbles for the last 16 minutes of the program. You can watch it online at the BBCs website. In the front row guests were representatives from both the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles & from Marbles Reunited. Of the panel, Germaine Greer presented a particularly good knowledge of the issue when it was discussed & appeared to be strongly supportive.

From:
BBC

The Big Questions
Series 2
Episode 22

Nicky Campbell presents the show live from Jack Hunt School in Peterborough. Taking part in the topical debates are writer and feminist Professor Germaine Greer, journalist Fareena Alam and the novelist and religious commentator, Anne Atkins.

This week’s big questions are:

Should there be an amnesty for illegal immigrants?
Can date rape be a woman’s fault?
Should the Elgin Marbles be returned?

Greece has built the New Acropolis Museum to re-house artefacts that there was no space for in the old museum on the Acropolis itself. It is no secret though that the key reason for the museum was to help secure the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum.

From:
The Australian

Athens builds a home for Parthenon’s marbles
Helen Vatsikopoulos | June 20, 2009

THE New Acropolis Museum in Athens will never become a landmark building. It will not be like Joern Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, its towering tiled sails reaching over the harbour, or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, with colossal steel whorls dominating the landscape.

But the city of Athens already has such a building, Phidias’s Parthenon. He designed it in the mid-5th century BC, funded by a hefty stimulus package to rebuild the archaic temples destroyed by the Persians; it’s still standing. The temple atop the Acropolis hill overlooking central Athens survived virtually unscathed for almost 2000 years, only to suffer its worst damage in the past 400: Venetian cannon balls, Ottoman dynamite, a bad restoration and acid rain have all taken their toll, along with an act of vandalism perpetrated by one man, a British diplomat. More on Lord Elgin later.
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A selection of photo gallery articles that showcase the New Acropolis Museum can be seen at the following websites.

From:
Financial Times

Slideshow: The new Acropolis Museum
Published: June 19 2009 15:12 | Last updated: June 19 2009 15:12

The new Acropolis Museum in Athens, containing the world’s finest collection of ancient Greek sculpture, opens to the public on Monday.

The Greek government hopes its opening will help revive an international campaign to bring back the Elgin marbles – sculptures from the Acropolis temples displayed in the British Museum in London.
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BBC1’s current affairs programme; The Big Question will be discussing the ethical debate surrounding the return of disputed artefacts in next Sunday’s episode (tying in with the opening of the New Acropolis Museum the previous day).

More details about the programe can be found on the BBC’s website.

As more information becomes available on this story, it seems that my initial suspicions were right & that no loan offer was ever made.

From:
Associated Press

UK museum refutes report of Greek antiquities loan
2009-06-11 23:19:03

ATHENS, Greece (AP) – The British Museum is refuting a Greek radio report saying it offered part of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece on a three-month loan.
A museum spokeswoman says the broadcaster had based its report on a statement referring to the museum’s standard policy for loaning objects.
Hannah Boulton says the museum has «not received any loan request for the Parthenon sculptures.

Earlier Thursday, Greece’s Culture Minister Antonis Samaras had rejected such a deal, saying it would mean renouncing any Greek claim to the 2,500-year-old sculptures. Greece hopes one day to display the works beside its own surviving Parthenon sections in a new museum opening next weekend.
The works originally decorated the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis of Athens.

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After years of internal conflict, Afghanistan has lost many of the records of its past to opportunistic looters. Efforts are being made however to catalogue & retrieve the artefacts for future generations to enjoy.

From:
BBC News

Page last updated at 17:25 GMT, Wednesday, 10 June 2009 18:25 UK
Looted treasures return to Afghanistan
By Sarah Rainsford
BBC News, Kabul

In a small room inside Kabul museum, staff are slowly unwrapping hundreds of stolen pieces of Afghanistan’s past.

Worth a fortune on the black market, the smugglers’ hoard was spotted and seized by customs officers at Heathrow airport in London.
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I’m intrigued by this story, as normally the British Museum is unable to return artefacts – this suggests that either:
A. the artefacts are only on loan to the British Museum at present
B. that the artefacts will only be returned as a loan by the British Museum or
C. that no one has considered this aspect yet.

From:
BBC News

Page last updated at 14:36 GMT, Sunday, 7 June 2009 15:36 UK
Roman ‘expense’ tablets head home

Roman writing tablets highlighting the inflated expenses claims of public officials 2,000 years ago are to return to their Northumberland home.

The tablets were found at Vindolanda – a Roman encampment on Hadrian’s Wall -in 1973 and detail hundreds of expenses claimed by Roman officials.
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The interesting aspect of this story is the fact that the general public seem willing to make entirely voluntary returns of fragments from ancient sites – they realise themselves that removing the pieces was the wrong thing to do. Unfortunately most museums seem reluctant to take similar actions without large amounts of coercion.

From:
BBC News

Page last updated at 14:22 GMT, Thursday, 7 May 2009 15:22 UK
Tourists return chip of Colosseum

Two US tourists who chipped off a piece of the Colosseum in Rome 25 years ago have returned it – along with an apology for taking it.

The fragment of stone, small enough to fit into a pocket, arrived in Italy in a package from California.
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More coverage of the most recent agreement by a British institution to return Aboriginal remains from its collection.

From:
BBC News

Page last updated at 13:56 GMT, Wednesday, 13 May 2009 14:56 UK
Museum returns Aboriginal remains

Members of an Aboriginal tribe held a ritual in front of Liverpool’s World Museum to mark the repatriation of human remains to Australia.

A skull is being returned to representatives of the Ngarrindjeri people because it has strong spiritual and religious significance.
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The BBC World Service had an interesting program about disputed items of cultural property, prompted by the fiasco surrounding the auction of artefacts from Yves Saint Lauren’s collection & the imminent sale of some personal items that belonged to Mahatma Gandhi. A number of other cases were also discussed during the programme. I appeared on it briefly & this website also got a mention.

You can download a podcast of the programme here.

From:
BBC World Service

02 Mar 09
On air: Should lost national treasures be returned?
By Ros Atkins

A Chinese bidder has refused to pay up over 30 million dollars that he successfully bid for two sculptures taken from Beijing in the 19th century. He’s being hailed as a hero in China, and it’s once again raised the issue of who owns items taken during past wars or colonial rule.

Recent examples….The Cleveland Museum of Art agreed to return 13 antiquities and a late Gothic processional cross to Italy after authorities there proved the works were looted, stolen or handled by traffickers. So does the time elapsed make a difference as to whether something should be returned – or indeed the way in which it was taken? A stolen greek vase was also returned to Italy.
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More coverage of the return of a sculpture of the head of Amenhotep III to Egypt from Britain.

From:
BBC News

Page last updated at 13:01 GMT, Friday, 19 December 2008
Britain to return Egypt sculpture

An ancient sculpture of a pharaoh smuggled out of Egypt disguised as a tacky souvenir is to be returned home after almost 20 years.

Antiques restorer Jonathan Tokeley-Parry dipped the stone head of Amenhotep III in plastic and painted it black to make it resemble a cheap copy.
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