Talks on Elgin Marbles return

[Merlion]

After 200 years, they'll have to think and agree on a win-win solution.

Talks due on Elgin Marbles return (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6578661.stm)

BBC, 21 April 2007, A lengthy dispute between Britain and Greece may move a step closer to a resolution when sides meet to discuss returning the Elgin Marbles to Athens.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42829000/jpg/_42829529_elgin_203bbc.jpg

Talks in two weeks' time will be the first serious negotiations after years of resistance by the British Museum.

The BBC's Malcolm Brabant said the director of the museum - holders of the sculptures for nearly 200 years - had hinted of a possible six-month loan.

The move has been welcomed by Victoria Solomonides, of London's Greek Embassy.

Talks between senior representatives from both nation's cultural ministries and their legal advisors will take place in London on 4 May.

'Pollution damage'

Malcolm Brabant, the BBC's Athens correspondent, said one option may be for the marbles to be held in a British Museum annexe of a new museum due to open in Athens this summer.

He said this would mean London could maintain ownership while the priceless sculptures, which once adorned the Parthenon temple, could be enjoyed by Greeks and their visitors.

[Araich]

Well, well. Time will tell.

[fritchie]

We've been over this topic several times before, and I'm glad to see the countries still talking. The route of keeping the material in British possession, in an embassy annex of sorts, while having it physically in Athens for a period, sounds to me it may be a good compromise.

[GlennT]

I say move them to neutral territory: My house!

[Merlion]

This is a commentry by the UK paper Guardian in the light of the current opening of the Acropolis Museum in Athens.

Should we give the Parthenon marbles back? (http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/heritage/story/0,,2192129,00.html)

16 Oct 2007, If only we'd listened to Byron, what a lot of trouble over the Elgin/Parthenon marbles would have been saved. "Dull is the eye that will not weep to see/Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed/By British hands ..." he wrote in Childe Harold. Two centuries on, the Parthenonites are still weeping, the Elginites still clinging on to the sculptures that Lord Elgin took from the Parthenon in the first decade of the 19th century.

The Parthenonites reckon the opening of the Acropolis Museum will clinch the argument. "There can no longer be any question about where or how the marbles should be displayed," says Eleni Cubitt, secretary of the British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles. The new museum, she says, will allow the sculptures to be seen as they were intended - as a single work of art.

But the British Museum, which claims ownership of the parts of the frieze taken by Elgin, is unmoved. "The new museum doesn't change anything," says communications manager Hannah Boulton. "The purpose of the British Museum is to present an overview of world civilisations, and the Parthenon sculpture is an integral part of that. ....."

The BM no longer suggests the Greeks would be unable to safeguard the marbles. Nor does it deploy the old argument that if the marbles were sent back, the Egyptians would want their mummies, too. The argument now is over context - local v general. The Elginites say that, by splitting the sculptures, we can have both. The argument is subtle, but wrong-headed. Byron was right, and it's time to fill in the gaps the Greeks are so tellingly leaving in their new museum.