George Vardas from Australians for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures, writes about how a new figure with the charisma & public appeal of the late Melina Mercouri is needed to lead Greece’s campaign for the reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures.

Greece’s Deputy Minister for Culture, Ms Angeliki Gerekou

From:
Neos Kosmos

“We need another Melina”
The Greek Culture Ministry and the campaign for the return of the Parthenon Sculptures
26 Jun 2014
George Vardas

Just over a year ago the then newly-appointed Culture Minister in Greece, Panos Panagiotopoulos, announced with considerable fanfare a new Greek initiative on the Parthenon Sculptures: a strategy based on convening a mediation under the auspices of UNESCO at which the British and Greek authorities would meet to attempt to reach a resolution of this long standing cultural dispute.

Some commentators, including this writer, were sceptical about how the British would react, as mediation requires both sides to enter into negotiations in good faith. Mr Panagiotopoulos was adamant that this was Greece’s official position and sought support for his stance from the various overseas national committees. In due course a formal request for mediation was sent to the British side by the UNESCO Director-General, Ms Irina Bukova, and we waited to see what the British response would be.
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Outside Greece, Melina Mercouri is famous first for her career as an actress, but next to that, as a campaigner for the return of the Parthenon Sculptures whilst she was minister of culture during the 1980s.

The The Cultural Organization of Prespes is presenting a tribute to the late actress – I don’t have any other details of it, but I would imagine that her passion for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles will play a part in it.

From:
Greek Reporter

Prespeia 2013 Tribute To Mercouri
By Nicky Mariam Onti on August 14, 2013

The Cultural Organization of Prespes, the Melina Mercouri Foundation and ADaM Productions of Badminton Theater are presenting the performance, Melina – Wherever I Travel To, Greece, on Aug. 23-24 a tribute to the late actress and former Culture Minister Melina Mercouri, who fought to have the stolen Parthenon Marbles returned from the British Museum.

The premier of the performance is to take place at the Prespeia International Festival and will then be as well presented at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus on Sept. 7.
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Following the change in Greece’s government a few weeks ago, the new Culture & Tourism Minister has announced that the intentions to vigorously pursue the campaign to reunify all the surviving Parthenon sculptures in the New Acropolis Museum.

From:
Athens News Agency

10/27/2009
Culture ministry priorities

Culture and Tourism Minister Pavlos Geroulanos underlined Monday that his top priority would be to organise the newly merged ministry of culture and tourism and the solutions that need to be given to lingering problems, while clarifying that he is the only one responsible for the culture sector.

On the strategy being followed for the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece, Geroulanos stressed that the efforts will continue. He also noted that the British Museum appeared to be concerned, since it had taken the trouble to distribute leaflets giving its positions called “why the Marbles must stay” (at the British Museum).
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The New Acropolis Museum is one of the most high profile cultural projects in Europe in the last decade. The British Museum still claims that its existence does not change anything though in the argument for the reunification of the Elgin Marbles.

From:
London Daily News

09 July, 2009 18:30 (GMT +01:00)
Why It’s Time We Lost ‘Our’ Marbles
By Gemma Brosnan

It has been described as one of the most high profile cultural projects undertaken in Europe this decade, costing over €120m after 33 years of planning.

Designed by Swiss-born/New York based architect, Bernard Tschumi and his Greek associate, Michael Photiadis, The New Acropolis museum opened in Athens last month to much fanfare, presenting a spectacular modern building boasting 226,000 square feet of glass, 150,000 square feet of display space spanning five floors and 4,000 artifacts.
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For many Greeks, the New Acropolis Museum is more than just a building – it has become a symbol of their pride in their country & their aspirations for their country.

From:
Daily Telegraph

Acropolis Museum: Athens unveils its bid for the Marbles
Greece’s New Acropolis Museum is a formidable rival to the British Museum and has renewed debate about the Elgin Marbles.
By Teresa Levonian Cole
Published: 5:00PM BST 30 Jun 2009

‘The opening of the New Acropolis Museum was one of the most emotional experiences of my life” says Tina Daskalantonakis, a Greek hotelier. “It is more than a museum – it is a symbol of national pride and hope for the future.”

The museum in question crouches 300 metres below the Acropolis. An angular behemoth of glass, steel, concrete and marble housing some 4,000 artefacts, it is the culmination of an idea first mooted by Konstantinos Karamanlis’s Conservative government in 1976 and, since the early 1980s, passionately advocated by the Socialist minister of culture Melina Mercouri: the creation of a home in which the Parthenon Marbles can be reunited and displayed to the world.
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New Europe has published three articles on the Parthenon Marbles. Whilst a lot has changed with the opening of the New Acropolis Museum, current indications are that this has had little impact on the British establishment who are still resolutely looking in the opposite direction pretending not to notice.

From:
New Europe

British Museum thieves: Return Greece’s Marbles
Author: Andy Dabilis
28 June 2009 – Issue : 840

With the opening of the dazzling 180 million Euro New Acropolis Museum in Athens, under the shadow of man’s greatest architectural and sculpted achievement, the Parthenon, the last of all the lame excuses the British Museum has used over the years to keep the marble friezes stolen by Lord Elgin 207 years ago has vanished, and with it, any sense of honour they had, which was none anyway, just as they have no shame. Whatever happened to the alleged British idea of doing what’s right instead of what makes money?

Somewhere, Melina Mercouri, the late, great Greek actress and former culture minister, is smiling about it too because she was perhaps the greatest champion of getting back the precious stones the British referred to as the Elgin Marbles, but which she was the first to call the Parthenon Marbles, shaming the British out of their foxholes. The new museum was her baby too, along with former prime minister Constantinos Karamanlis. But let’s go all the way and call them what they are: the Greek Marbles, even if they will never be returned.
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This week’s Economist has two articles about the Parthenon Marbles. The previous week they featured an archive article from 1983 on the same subject.

From:
Economist

Leaders
Lord Elgin and the Parthenon marbles
Snatched from northern climes
Jun 25th 2009

Greek demands to get back the Elgin marbles risk stopping a better idea: museums lending their treasures

THERE is much to be said for moral clarity. Greece is insisting that the British Museum surrender the marble sculptures that Lord Elgin took down from the Parthenon and carted away in the early 1800s. Anything less, it says, would “condone the snatching of the marbles and the monument’s carving-up 207 years ago.” The Greek demand for ownership will arouse widespread sympathy, even among those who accept the British Museum’s claim to the marbles. With the opening of an impressive new museum in Athens (see article), the sculptures from the Parthenon now have good cause to be reunited, if only for artistic reasons.

But sometimes clarity is self-defeating. A previous Greek administration was willing to finesse the question of ownership and co-operate with the British Museum over a joint display of the marbles. By hardening its position, the Greek government risks driving museums everywhere into clinging to their possessions for fear of losing them. If the aim is for the greatest number of people to see the greatest number of treasures, a better way must be found.
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Christopher Hitchens has written a 4 page piece in Vanity Fair about the Parthenon Marbles & the reasons why he believes that they belong in Greece. Unlike many recent pieces though, although it is prompted by the opening of the New Acropolis Museum, it goes far deeper into the argument, looking at many aspects of it rather than purely focussing on this most recent development.

From:
Vanity Fair

Acropolis Now
The Lovely Stones
Among the first to visit Greece’s new Acropolis Museum, devoted to the Parthenon and other temples, the author reviews the origins of a gloriously “right” structure (part of a fifth-century-b.c. stimulus plan) and the continuing outrage that half its façade is still in London.
By Christopher Hitchens July 2009

The great classicist A. W. Lawrence (illegitimate younger brother of the even more famously illegitimate T.E. “of Arabia”) once remarked of the Parthenon that it is “the one building in the world which may be assessed as absolutely right.” I was considering this thought the other day as I stood on top of the temple with Maria Ioannidou, the dedicated director of the Acropolis Restoration Service, and watched the workshop that lay below and around me. Everywhere there were craftsmen and -women, toiling to get the Parthenon and its sister temples ready for viewing by the public this summer. There was the occasional whine of a drill and groan of a crane, but otherwise this was the quietest construction site I have ever seen—or, rather, heard. Putting the rightest, or most right, building to rights means that the workers must use marble from a quarry in the same mountain as the original one, that they must employ old-fashioned chisels to carve, along with traditional brushes and twigs, and that they must study and replicate the ancient Lego-like marble joints with which the master builders of antiquity made it all fit miraculously together.
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Coverage of the New Acropolis Museum in the lead up to the official opening on 20th June.

From:
ERT (Greece)

19 Jun 2009
The New Acropolis Museum: Vision Becomes Reality

A lifelong vision, a bet that was finally won, a political pledge, a cultural duty, but above all “the need and duty of a Nation towards its legacy,” the New Acropolis Museum that houses invaluable finds dating from the 4th Millennium BC to the 5th century AD found on the Sacred Hill of the Acropolis has finally come into being.

A Modern Museum Is Born

Squeezed between modern buildings and an imposing building constructed by Bavarian architect Wilhelm von Weiler, a few metres away from the Acropolis entrance and the Ancient Theatre of Dionysos, the New Acropolis Museum, built on pedestrian walkway of Dionysiou Areopagitou Street, looks like hanging between the past and the present of Athens.
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The New Acropolis Museum represents the most important step forward in the campaign to reunify the Parthenon Marbles since they were originally removed from the Acropolis over two hundred years ago. The heirs of Lord Elgin will not be invited tot he ceremony, although dwelling on this aspect seems to be something led by the press rather than an important part of the opening. If the heirs of Lord Elgin see the museum, maybe they will realsie that it is the best location for the sculptures & put their support behind the reunification campaigns.

From:
Scotsman

Greece steps up marbles bid with new museum opening
Published Date: 21 May 2009
By Renee Maltezou in Athens

GREECE will open a new Acropolis museum in June, with the aim of bringing back historical artefacts exhibited in the British Museum in London.
Greece has long campaigned to retrieve the Parthenon sculptures, saying they were an integral part of one of the world’s most important monuments, but the British Museum has refused to return the treasures.

The Acropolis museum, built below the Parthenon and the other classical age marble temples of the Acropolis, has experienced years of delay with legal battles and missed deadlines plaguing its construction.
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The New Acropolis Museum opens next month, but opinion is divided on whether the Elgin Marbles should be returned from the British Museum to complete its main exhibit.

From:
Daily Telegraph (UK)

Greek government unveils new home for Elgin Marbles
Fresh demands for the return of the Elgin Marbles are accompanying the launch next month of the £115 million Acropolis Museum, which has a reserved space for the world’s most famous piece of classical statuary.
By Andrew Pierce in Athens
Last Updated: 12:02PM BST 11 May 2009

The 270,000 sq ft museum is being established as a home for the 160-metre long strip of marble that adorned the Parthenon until 1801. The museum, which stands just 400 metres from the Parthenon, opens in June – three decades after the building was first proposed.

Antonis Samaras, the minister for culture and Athletics said: “The opening of the Acropolis Museum is a major world event. June 20th will be a day of celebration for all civilised people, not for Greeks alone. I want the Britons especially to consider the Acropolis Museum as the most hospitable place for them.”
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This piece on the Chinese Bronzes identifies Cai Mingchao as China’s Melina Mercouri – someone who will spearhead the fight to reunify cultural property with its homeland. Events such as the ones involving the bronzes often re-expose fault lines in international relations that people had thought were long forgotten, by highlighting the inequities of the past.

From:
Financial Times

Beijing bronzes expose faultline with west
By Geoff Dyer in Beijing
Published: March 6 2009 19:15 | Last updated: March 6 2009 19:15

Mention the Earls of Elgin and one notorious holder of the title springs to mind – the one-time British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (and 7th earl) who, in 1801, removed the marble sculptures from the Parthenon that are now housed in the British Museum.

His son is less well-known, but he was also responsible for what many view as an infamous act of cultural vandalism. In the aftermath of the second opium war in 1860, it was the 8th Earl of Elgin who ordered French, British and Punjabi soldiers to destroy the Old Summer Palace in Beijing.
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