Victoria Solomonides, Boris Johnson, Thaila Stathatou and Greek Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri at Oxford University June 1986

23 December 2021, TA Nea

Four eminent figures in British public life, speak to Yannis Andritsopulos, UK Correspndent for Ta Nea and ask Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson for the return of the Parthenon Sculptures

When he was young, he said that one day he would become "king of the world." Later, Boris Johnson lowered the bar: he decided to become Britain's prime minister. In 2019, he made it to that post.

The reputation that follows him, however, is not that of the great leader, but of the deceptive politician, who will not hesitate to say and do anything - and later take it back - if he thinks it will benefit him.

He did the same with the Parthenon Sculptures: in 1986 he was a prominent advocate for their return to Greece, confessing that Elgin stole them, as revealed by "TA NEA" last Saturday, 18 December 2021. Today, he claims the opposite. Could he change his mindonce again and allow the Greeks to rediscover their "pride and identity", as Melina Mercouri described Pheidias' masterpieces?

Eminent personalities of British public life are asking Prime Minister Johnson to do the right thing and facilitate the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles in the Acropolis Museum. Speaking to Ta Nea:

Janet Suzman, Chair of the British Committtee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles

[RETURNING the Marbles to Greece] 'would require an Act of Parliament to hand them back. This, needless to say, seems to be a more or less insuperable brake on the process of return - yet it could be passed in an afternoon.'
I quote this observation from the younger Boris Johnson’s paper on the theft of the Parthenon Marbles because it isolates the nub of the present situaation. What he is saying is that where there’s a will there’s a way. Once a government had decided to do the right thing and return the Marbles to their mother country, the Act that formally adopted them could be quickly rescinded to un-adopt them. One senses a faint groundswell of feeling that is tending that way; if you took a poll today most people would say it is only fair and right that the Parthenon Marbles should be returned. Mr Mitsotakis should soon make a quiet return visit to Mr Johnson and gently persuade him to make amends. It would enhance a reputation much battered by indecisions and prevarications not to say certain economies with the truth. Come back Mr Mitsotakis - this is your baby!

Paul Cartledge, Professor Emeritus of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge, Vice Chair of the BCRPM and IARPS

At 22, Boris Johnson had a brighter vision than he had as mayor of London, then as foreign secretary and, now, as prime minister. Last week it was ten years since the untimely loss of Christopher Hitchens, a passionate man who was a fellow student of mine at the University of Oxford in the late 1960s. He was one of the most ardent supporters of the reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures and I can well imagine how he would comment on the recriminations and inconsistencies of Johnson, once a student of Classical Studies at Oxford, and now our pitiful prime minister.

Edith Hall,  Professor of Classics and Ancient Greek Literature at Durham University, member of BCRPM

Boris Johnson's attitude to the sculptures of the Parthenon is that they are no more than a rhetorical football in his eternal game of self-promotion. As an undergraduate who liked to titillate audiences by presenting himself as a subversive controversialist, he accidentally produced an excellent moral and legal case for immediate reunification. But as a self-seeking politician he mouths what he thinks it is expedient for the most narrow-minded of his party loyalists to hear.

Sickening cynicism. He is a moral invertebrate.

But even he may be embarrassed by this astonishing discovery.

Sarah Baxter, former deputy editor of The Sunday Times

Johnson has in his office a bust of Pericles, which is a copy of the bust in the British Museum. Accordingly, the British Museum should commission copies of the Parthenon Sculptures and return the real ones to Greece. The reunification of the Marbles is morally imperative. In a last noble gesture as prime minister, Johnson should return them to where they belong. When arguing in favour of Greece, in the article he wrote as a student, Johnson noted that the Greek gods cannot and should not be deceived. Be sure that if he returns the Sculptures, the gods will smile at him again.

Boris Johnson and the triumph of Melina Mercouri

Boris Johnson with Melina Mercouri at Oxford University June 1986

In 1986, Johnson asked Melina Mercouri to speak at an Oxford Union debate on the subject of the reunification of Parthenon Sculptures. The Greek Minister of Culture won the debate by 167 votes in favour and 85 against. Dr Victoria Solomonides, a member of the Board of Directors of the Melina Mercouri Foundation, then an educational advisor at the Greek Embassy in London, reveals the background to this triumph.

"In October 1983, with the establishment of BCRPM, we began with the late Eleni Cubittthe effort to join British personalities. In the autumn of 1985, we came into contact with Oxford students. Among them, Boris Johnson, then secretary of the Oxford Union. When he was elected president, we proposed to hold a discussion on the subject with speakers Melina and the professor of logic, Michael Dammett. He immediately accepted and appointed as rapporteurs of the opposite side the architectural historian Gavin Stamp and the writer Jonathan Barnes. Although Johnson did not express a clear opinion on the return of the Sculptures, the impression we got was that it was positive. His article revealed by "TA NEA" is based on and, to a large part, copies the notes we had sent him to prepare for the event."

The return of the British Museum's Parthenon Marbles to Greece, according to Reuters' report on Sunday, may be possible 'even if the two sides cannot come to an agreement over who owns the sculptures'.

Greece's request for the return of the sculptures began shortly after independence. The more recent request was made by the then Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri in 1983, when the Greek government formally asked the UK government to return the marbles to Greece and, in 1984, listed the dispute with UNESCO. The Greek government has always only requesed the return of the sculptures that Lord Elgin removed from the Parthenon at the start of the 19th century.

The Pope last year announced that he would donate three fragmented pieces from the Vatican Museums to Greece. The signing of the agreement took place in Rome on  Tuesday 07 March 2023.

Talks bewtween Greece and the British Museum have been going on since late 2021, and were disclosed when Prime Minister Mitsotakis came to London in November of 2022 to address the LSE.

The British Museum's Parthenon collection could be returned to Greece under a long-term cultural partnership agreement, Reuters reported on Sunday 12 March.

The plans, which have been discussed with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and British Museum's Chair George Osborne, would see a rotation of Greek masterpieces offered to the British Museum, including some that have never been seen outside Greece*.(This was offered by Greece for the first time in 2000, 23 years ago!).

Such an arrangement could avoid the requirement for a change in the law to allow the British Museum to dispose of its artefacts, the same point raised in 2000 also.  And yet,  George Osborne has played down the prospect of a permanent return of the marbles, instead suggested an arrangement where the marbles can be shared by both museums and seen in London and Athens.

This story is set to run for a little longer.

Read the aricle by Liam Kelly, Arts Correspondent for the Sunday Times, and for those that read in Greek in Ta Nea, although there are paywalls.

Sunday 23 February 2020,  The Sunday Times, Deputy Editor Sarah Baxter, wrote her  modest proposal for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, aptly entitled: "The sane move is to give Greece back its Elgin marbles".

The first 'modet proposal' was written by Christopher Hitchens (pages 104 to 106) in the third edition of  'The Parthenon, The Case for Reunification' published by Versoin May 2008 and launched at Chatham House by the BCRPM. The second was written by Stephen Fry in 2011, you can  read that here too. 

Sarah Baxter attended the International Conference: 'The Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures'  in Athens on 15 April 2019 and saw for her self  "the marvellous museum facing the Acropolis that was built 10 years ago to house the marbles — much lighter and more beautiful than the windowless strip devoted to the sculptures that is admired" at the British Museum. She also spoke at the conference which was hosted by the President of  the Hellenic Republic, Prokopios Pavlopoulos.

In the Sunday Times of the 23rd of February, Sarah Baxter suggestes  the UK had "no need to keep the marbles when it was possible to access the “universal” culture, so prized by the British Museum, by the clever use of technology. As mayor of London in 2016, Johnson had welcomed to Trafalgar Square a 3D replica of the beautiful arch of Palmyra destroyed by Isis in Syria. And, of course, his own trusty bust of Pericles, the “populist” who ordered the construction of most of the Acropolis, is a fake — and none the less inspirational for UK's prime minister."

Sarah's article can be accessed on line or follow the link here.

Following on from Sarah's article, the Director of the British Museum, Dr Hartwig Fischer wrote a letter, which was published on 01 March:

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Sunday March 01 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

Greeks should be glad we have the marbles

Sarah Baxter’s column on the Parthenon sculptures asks us to imagine how we would feel if Big Ben had been transplanted to Athens (“The sane move is to give Greece back its marbles”, Comment, last week). This is to ignore the many buildings and artworks that have been reused, reshaped and often moved across borders, such as Duccio’s altarpiece the Maesta, elements of which have been removed from Siena cathedral and are held in museums across Europe and America.

The Parthenon sculptures are fragments of a lost whole that cannot be put back together. Only about 50% of the original sculptures survive from antiquity. The Parthenon has become a European monument precisely because its sculptures can be seen not only in Athens but in London and other European cities. The public benefit of this distribution and what it means for our shared cultural inheritance is self-evident, and something to celebrate.

Hartwig Fischer, director, British Museum

Minister of Culture for Greece, Dr Lina Mendoni also responded by saying that Dr Fischer's letter was as “unfortunate, if not outright unacceptable.” To read one of the article's quoting Dr Mendoni, follow the link here.

As expected, this was not well received by most not just in the UK but elsewhere too. Yannis Andritsopoulos, London Correspondent for Ta Nea, Greece's daily newspaper, wrote an article  following on from Dr Fischer's letter to the Sunday Times, quoting a number of BCRPM members including Janet Suzman, Alex Benakis,  Dr Peter Thonemann and Professor John Tasioulas. An English version of the Ta Nea article can be read here.

As Chair of the BCRPM, Janet also submitted a letter to the Sunday Times, which is printed in today's paper, alongside one from Dr Peter Thonemann Professor of ancient history, Wadham College, Oxford  and a member of BCRPM. The online link is here and the texts for both letters are below:

Behind the Times at the Museum

Hartwig Fischer, the director of the British Museum and a respected art historian, fails to find a credible parallel for the Parthenon’s dispersed marbles (“Greeks should be glad we have the marbles”, Letters, last week). This is not surprising: there is none.

Thinking people in London were holding anguished debates on the merits of keeping the marbles 200 years ago. They still are. What has changed is the mood abroad: colonial acquisitions are regarded with an increasingly active disdain.

The Greeks have waited for the return of the marbles since 1843, with great dignity and patience. After his latest utterance in defence of the indefensible, Fischer should be aware that patience is wearing thin.

Janet Suzman, chairwoman, British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles

Hack job
Since the Parthenon frieze cannot be fully put back together, Fischer thinks that having its sculptures spread around London and other European cities is a “public benefit” and “something to celebrate”.

My local museum doesn’t have any bits of the Parthenon, and the British Museum has loads. It’s not fair. I wonder if Fischer might be persuaded to hack a few pretty bits off his sculptures and send them our way. If the division between Athens and London is to be celebrated, surely dividing them further would be even more beneficial.
Peter Thonemann, Professor of ancient history, Wadham College, Oxford (member of BCRPM)

Read Janet Suzman's letter sent directly to Dr Fischer on Friday by post and by email. 

Images from left to right: Sarah Baxter Deputy Editor of the Sunday Times, Dr Hartwig Fischer Drirector of the British Museum, Dr Lina Mendoni Greek Minister of Culture and Sport, Dame Janet Suzman BCRPM, Dr Peter Thonemann, Professor of Ancient History, Wadham College, Oxford and BCRPM member

Twelve British philhellenes share their thoughts on Greece ahead of 2023, writes Yannis Andritsopoulos, London Correspondent for the Greek daily newspaper Ta Nea. 

The 1821 Greek Revolution against the rule of the Ottoman Turks sparked a wave of sympathy and support in many parts of the world, which came to be known as the ‘Philhellenic movement’ or ‘Philhellenism’ (the love for Greek culture and the Greek people).

April 19, the date on which the poet and great philhellene Lord Byron died, has been declared by the Greek state as Philhellenism and International Solidarity Day.

Two hundred years on, many people around the world continue to love Greece and stand by it.

Twelve acclaimed contemporary British philhellenes send their wishes for the New Year to Greece and the Greek people in this article written exclusively for the Greek daily newspaper Ta Nea. Notably, most of them think that the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles is one of the highest priorities in Greek-British relations.

Sarah Baxter

Journalist, Director of the Marie Colvin Centre for International Reporting, former Deputy Editor of The Sunday Times, Member of the Parthenon Project's Advisory Board

Happy 2023! Here's to a year of friendship and harmony. I'm hoping we will see the Parthenon sculptures begin their permanent journey home, with some wonderful Greek treasures heading in the other direction to the British Museum on loan. We know a "win-win" deal is going to happen eventually. Let's get on with it!

Roderick Beaton

Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek & Byzantine History, Language & Literature at King’s College London, Chair of the Council of the British School at Athens

A wish that won't come true: for the UK to return to the place it left in the EU following Brexit. Not only would we, the friends of Greece, regain the right we lost to stay close to you without restrictions, but also the voice of a country that had so much to offer to everyone would be heard during the political developments and critical decisions that 2023 will inevitably bring. Just imagine how you Greeks managed your referendum more skilfully than we did!

Paul Cartledge

A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, President of The Hellenic Society, Vice-Chair of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM) and Vice-President of the International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures (IARPS)

Greece has become such a major world player in the past century, not to mention the past two centuries, that it's hard to select any contemporary or likely future issue where relations between Britain and Greece in 2024 are not of the utmost significance. In the sphere of international cultural relations and soft diplomacy, one issue stands out above all others for Greece and Britain mutually speaking: 'the Marbles'. A resolution sparked by British generosity is devoutly to be wished.

Bruce Clark

Author, journalist and lecturer, Online Religion Editor of The Economist, BCRPM member

In 2023 it will be 190 years since the Ottoman garrison left the Acropolis and the Holy Rock became an archaeological site which fascinated and dazzled the world. The arguments for reuniting the Parthenon sculptures, for the benefit of people in Greece, Britain and many other countries, become stronger with every passing year.

Alberto Costa MP

Conservative Member of Parliament for South Leicestershire and Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Greece

On behalf of the All-Parliamentary Group for Greece in the British Parliament, I would like to wish our friends in the Greek Parliament, and the Greek people, a very happy New Year. I am delighted that relations between our two countries are stronger than ever and that Greece and her people enjoy a huge amount of support in the British Parliament. We very much look forward to building upon on our relationship, and our shared values and commitments, next year and in further strengthening the historic bonds that our two countries share.

Armand D'Angour

Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford, Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford, BCRPM member

It is heartening to see that the partnership of the UK and Greece is closer than ever, and that the green light has now been given for the return of the Parthenon sculptures to their rightful home. In these politically fractious times, governments should recognise who their friends are and be generous with both moral and practical support. The return of the sculptures will be a long-awaited gesture of friendship as well as a great morale-booster for both countries.

Hugo Dixon

Journalist, Commentator-at-Large with Reuters

My 2023 wish is that Turkey chooses a new leader and the West finds a way to bring the country in from the cold. A new leader should realise that it is not in Turkey’s interests to play the West off against Russia – especially as Vladimir Putin is a loser. If Turkey comes back to the heart of NATO, Greece will be one of the biggest beneficiaries.

Kevin Featherstone

Director of the Hellenic Observatory at the LSE, Eleftherios Venizelos Professor in Contemporary Greek Studies and Professor in European Politics at the LSE’s European Institute

Dear Greece,

I hope we will agree to send the Marbles back in 2023. Our two countries have a long-term ‘love affair’ and it’s the least we could do after the folly of ‘BREXIT’ – pushing up university fees for Greek students. But we have a favour to ask, please. At present, our prime ministers don’t last as long as a lettuce, and they have much less brain power, so might you have a politician to spare? Not Dimitriadis or Kaili, though, or we’ll go ‘nuclear’ and send you Boris.

Judith Herrin

Archaeologist, byzantinist, historian, Professor Emerita of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies and Constantine Leventis Senior Research Fellow at King's College London, BCRPM member

Dear friends,
As 2022 comes to an end, I send my warmest greetings to Greece hoping for a healthier and more peaceful New Year.
The campaign for the return of the Parthenon Marbles to their rightful place in the new Acropolis Museum gathers momentum, reminding us of the powerful initiative of Melina Mercouriand Eleni Cubitt.
Let's hope for a breakthrough in 2023! Happy New Year!

Victoria Hislop

Author, BCRPM member

I wish all my friends in Greece a Happy New Year. We are living in uncertain times but there is one thing I am becoming more certain of - opinions are beginning to shift significantly on the Parthenon Sculptures and I think we are moving closer to the time when they will be returned to their rightful home in Athens. Many other museums in Britain are recognising that they have objects in their possession that were unlawfully acquired during our colonial past - and the return of Elgin’s “loot” is long overdue. This is my wish for 2023.

Denis MacShane

Former Minister of State for Europe in the Tony Blair government, former President of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), author and commentator

2022 was the year Britain returned to Greece. Up to August 2022, 3 million visitors went from the UK to Greece – a three-fold increase on the previous year. The weak English pound devalued thanks to Brexit has not damaged the love affair of the English with Greece.

But love has its limits. Although Prime Minister Mitsotakis told a packed meeting at the London School of Economics that he hoped soon the looted Parthenon Marbles would rejoin the rest of the sculptures from the Parthenon in the Acropolis Museum, there was no indication from Britain’s Conservative ministers London was willing to move.

The pro-Turkish Boris Johnson was fired by Tory MPs from his post as Prime Minister. But while France’s President Macron has expressed support for Greece as Turkey’s President Erdogan, inspired by Vladimir Putin, steps up his bellicose language threatening Greece, Britain remained silent in 2022 on the need for Europe to stand with Greece against Erdogan’s threats and demagogy.

Dame Janet Suzman

Chair of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM), actor, Honorary Associate Artist at The Royal Shakespeare Company

In a world which seems unremittingly wicked we want tales of powerful gods presiding over squabbling mortals and blissful marriages with happy endings. That’s my dream for the Parthenon Marbles: the Prime Minister will charm the Chairman of the British Museum into a wedding ceremony in the Acropolis Museum, to witness the marriage of the two estranged halves of the glorious Parthenon pediment - accompanied by the cheers of the wedding guests galloping happily round the frieze, now returned home. If only…

This article was published in the Greek daily newspaper Ta Nea(www.tanea.gr) on 30 December 2022.