2020 News

words are transient, yet the written texts remain forever

Dr Christiane Tytgat, Chair of the IARPS

Wednesday 29 January 2020 at the Acropolis Museum, the launch of the published proceedings of the 15 April 2019 International Conference: 'The Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures'. The conference was held under the auspices of the President of the Hellenic Republic, Prokopios Pavlopoulos. A number of campaigning committees attended and some also spoke at the conference, including Professor Louis Godart, Chair of the International Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures (IARPS), Dame Janet Suzman as Chair of the BCRPM and Professor Paul Cartledge as Vice Chair of the BCRPM.  

Both Professor Louis Godart as the Former Chair for the International Assciation and the current Chair Christiiane Tytgat, spoke at the event held on the 29th of January this year and their respective speeches can be read below. 

29 January

  

Chair of the International Association, Christiane Tytgat's address:

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President of the International Association, Dr Christiane Tytgat's address at the launch of the Proceedings of the International Conference on the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures, held at the Acropolis Museum on April 15, 2019:
Your Excellency, Mr President, Your Excellency, Madam Minister, Dear Friends and Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen, first of all I would like to thank His Excellency, the President of the Hellenic Republic, Mr Pavlopoulos, the Minister of Culture and Sports, Dr Mendoni and the President of the Acropolis Museum, Professor Pantermalis for the honour of inviting me to be here with you today.

It is a great pleasure to be here again, in this wonderful Museum which celebrated its 10th anniversary last year with a series of events. Among these events, the key event was the opening of the archaeological excavation beneath the museum on the 20th of June 2019. Hence the Museum adds again an element to its precious wealth and shows, once again, that it is a museum always in motion, a museum that offers continually something new to its visitors. I wonder, how many other museums can say this without organising a temporary exhibition and bringing artefacts from elsewhere? Increasingly the Acropolis Museum evokes the image of the sacred rock: the Parthenon Room, at the top of the Acropolis Museum, which is waiting for more than 10 years to be completed, now dominates an ancient neighbourhood of Athens, as in ancient times the Acropolis was dominating the ancient city.

The conference "Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures" was part of these anniversary festivities. I would add that after 10 years of the Museum's operation, it is a pity that we still have to hold another conference on this subject, however we can look at this in a positive way too. Many speakers from Greece, but also from all over the world made the journey to participate in the conference and show their interest in the issue of reunification. Each intervention embraced the issue from a different perspective, from the results of recent research and proposals for a solution to actions to keep the case in the news until we achieve our goal. The conference was resounding in its message, delivered so eloquently by so many speakers.

But "words are transient, yet the written texts remain forever". That is why it is very important that the Proceedings of the conference were published. There is also no better time to present them, since today begins the Year of Melina Mercouri, the great protagonist for the return of the Sculptures. We cannot honour her in a better way: her campaign for the return of the Parthenon Sculptures from the British Museum continues and her vision is more alive than ever.

Melina's campaign is no longer the struggle of any one person or the Hellenic Government who made the first request to the British Museum for the return in 1842. The struggle was transferred - and rightly so - globally, since the Parthenon and its Sculptures are a world cultural heritage.

In 1981, the first Committee was established in Australia, headed up by its President Emanuel Comino. It remains very active to this day. Following Melina's passionate appeal to UNESCO in 1982, the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles was founded in 1983. This was followed by the formation of many more committees worldwide.

At a conference organized in November 2005 by the Hellenic Government, 12 national committees established the International Association for the Reunification of Parthenon Sculptures (IARPS) with the aim of supporting the Hellenic Government in its repatriation efforts and the reunification of all the surviving parts of the Sculptures in the new Acropolis Museum. Since then, other new national committees have joined the International Association, most recently France (2016), Austria (2017), and - as strange as it may seem - the oldest committee from Australia (2018). In January 2020 we were delighted to also welcome the new Luxembourg committee.

Today, the IARPS has a total of 21 national committees spanning 19 countries. Every now and then a committee, like Russia in recent years, had fallen by the wayside but Moscow has given the committee a new impetus for the last six months and with great enthusiasm is organising its first lecture in February this year under the auspices of the Greek Ambassador in Moscow.

The IARPS works closely with the Greek authorities and supports the policy of cultural diplomacy, which Greece has been pursuing for years. The return of the Sculptures is a moral problem rather than a legal one. The International Association, which coordinates the activities of the national committees, observes that the public interest continues to grow, clearly illustrated by the continuously growing number of participants in our activities. The general climate helps us probably: the call for the repatriation of cultural heritage artefacts is global. There isn’t a day when a new article is not published and new activities are taking place. And in England, key voices grow louder too. Big museums are under pressure every day. So we are all optimistic that the time will come when theses museums will be able to do nothing less than return the stolen parts of the Parthenon to the place they rightfully belong: the Acropolis Museum in Athens, where one can see the sculptures by Pheidias on display in the best possible conditions, in direct visual contact with the Parthenon, where they are an integral part of. It would be a very happy coincidence if this would happen in 2021, the 200nd anniversary of the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence.

In conclusion, as Chair of the International Association and its 21 national Committees, I extend a very warm thank you to H.E. the President of the Hellenic Republic, Mr Pavlopoulos for his support over the years for the reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures.

 

 To read more about the conference held on 15 April 2019, click here.

Professor Louis Godart, Former Chair of the International Association (2016-2019)

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The stars in the skies of Attica and Greece saw the birth of Western Civilization, just as they saw the watchman above the palace of Mycenae catch the first evidence of the fall of Troy, and as they witnessed the enthusiasm of Pericles and of all the Athenians, when after 480 BC the city reinvented democracy, and rebuilt the monuments of Acropolis, the only place in the world where spirit and courage dwell together.

These are the very stars that also witnessed Elgin's assault when without any respect from 1801 to 1804 he violated the sanctity of the Parthenon, the temple, a global symbol of Democracy.

Inside the Acropolis Museum there is the stele of Mourning Athena. She is standing in front of another small stele. She is not wearing her aegis breastplate, her helmet doesn't cover her face. Her spear has its point on the base of the stele. What did the sculptor want to tell us when in about 460 BCE he carved this masterpiece?

Athena is the goddess of the intellect. She is also the goddess who is ready at all times for battle.

I believe that the stele bore the names of those Athenians who died at Marathon, Salamis and Plataea. Mourning Athena is showing the Athenians respect for those who saved Greece and Western Civilization. In our midst, the notion that Democracy must always be fought for is being honoured. We must always be ready, like the goddess, with our spear close to hand if we want to defend something of value and distinction.

So anyone who loves Greece and democracy - the Parthenon being as I said a symbol of Greece - must fight for the repatriation of Pheidias' sculptures.

I do not forget that in 1940 England - glory to the pilots of the RAF - saved European democracy. That Churchill said at the time: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." England cannot today fail to heed the cry of everyone in the world who wants the sculptures to be near to the temple of the goddess. Today a lot of people in England are fighting alongside us. We will help them.

I hope that soon the stars of the heavens of Greece will again see the goddess' marbles beside the sacred rock.

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The Battle of Salamis therefore and thereby was added to the Battle of Marathon as the twin founding victories not only of Athens and of Greece but of demokratia.

Professor Paul Cartledge

20 January 2020, Athens

Professor Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture emeritus University of Cambridge and Vice-Chair of BCRPM, spoke at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre for a conference:Thermopylae & Salamis, Evaluating their Importance to the Modern World. His speech was entitled: Greece's Finest Hour? Salamis 2500 in Democratic Perspective. 

 

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'Democratic Implications': a lecture to reconsider the Battle of Salamis (September 480 BCE) and its wider implications from a specifically democratic point of view, i.e., in what way(s) was the Battle and (loyalist) Greek victory a victory of and for democracy?

Ancient Greek demokratia was not our (modern, liberal, representative) 'democracy': the ancient Athenians invented demokratia - people-power - and enjoyed it in various forms for almost 200 years (c. 507-322/1 BCE). In the 330s the Athenians felt that their demokratia was under threat from - monarchical, autocratic - Macedon. Hence the passage of this law against tyranny, proposed by Eukrates. Not all Athenians could read but most had eyes to see, and what is shown here in the crowning relief above the text of the Law is Demokratia in action - the goddess Demokratia crowning an imaginary ideal representation of the Athenian Demos ('People').

Statue-group of the so-called 'Tyrannicides' (turannoktonoi in Greek), Harmodios and Aristogeiton. This is a very much later, Roman copy in marble of a bronze original of the 470s which itself was a replacement for the c. 506 original. Actually - as historian Thucydides caustically observed - Harmodios and Aristogeiton did not kill the tyrant Hippias (but his younger brother), but the Athenian democracy, which was founded a half-dozen years later, treated the assassination retrospectively as the democracy's founding mythical charter - demokratia thus being seen as essentially anti-tyranny.

The Athenians' 'Treasury' at Delphi 480s BCE: in 490 the Athenians together with their allies from Plataea defeated a much larger Persian army on the battlefield of Marathon in eastern Attica - the Treasury the Athenians then had built at Delphi, symbolic religious centre of all Hellas, alongside the Sacred Way, marked that victory for all other Greek and non-Greek worshippers to see. Herodotus, historian of the Graeco-Persian Wars and indeed the world's first historian properly so called, made the connection explicitly between the introduction of demokratia (in the form of equalityof political speech) at Athens and the Athenians' new prowess on the battlefield (5.78).

Ostracism (ostrakophoria) at Athens in the 480s:

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Themistocles

Marathon was a great victory - but the Persians could not let it go at that: they would be back, and in huge force, by both land and sea, to conquer and occupy. The burning question for the Athenians of the 480s therefore was - what attitude should we adopt towards the Persians?
Appeasement (note the deliberate reminiscence of Britain in the 1930s vis-a-vis Nazi Germany)? Or Resistance? If the latter, how best to resist?

Beginning in the early 480s a series of ostracisms were held by the Athenians to try to decide the issue in a specifically democratic way: first, the Assembly was asked - do you wish to hold an ostracism? if a majority voted yes, then this procedure was held a couple of months later.

Ostracism was in effect a reverse election - the 'candidate', ie the leading politician, who received the most (negative) votes of the 6000 plus cast (on named potsherds, ostraka) was ostracised, that is, exiled for 10 years... One of the several ostracised was Aristides (though in 480 he was recalled in the dire emergency situation).

The candidate who survived every ostracism procedure of the 480s and emerged triumphant at the end of the decade was Themistokles son of Neokles of the deme Phrearrhoi. It was he who advocated a predominantly naval policy (despite Marathon having been won by the heavy infantry), he who masterminded the Greeks' naval victory at Salamis in September 480 (though the Admiral of the Fleet was formally a Spartan), and he who therefore differentially empowered the poorer Athenian citizens who rowed the trireme warships (Athens supplied up to 200). In short, after Kleisthenes, Themistokles was the Second Founder of demokratia for the Athenians.

The Parthenon - 'Parthenon' is of course a modern name - in antiquity that was the name only of the cella, the central hall in which was erected the cult-statue of Athena Parthenos 'Virgin'. The Parthenon was indeed a religious building, a temple, but it was a very peculiar one; Athena Parthenos did not have her own dedicated altar. It had therefore important secular as well as religious functions - it celebrated civilisation over barbarism, Hellenism over foreignness, and, above all, Athenian democracy over all other forms of political organisation Greek or non-Greek. Not least, it housed the Athenians' treasury - or war-chest. The Parthenon was voted, erected, supervised and managed by and largely for the Athenian Demos.

19th-century lithograph showing Salamis as visible from the Acropolis. Actually the key ancient view was from the Propylaea, started a decade after the Parthenon, and never finished: it was so designed as to frame Salamis as one exited the Acropolis - after, for example, taking part in the Panathenaea festival (depicted ideally in the Parthenon frieze). The Battle of Salamis therefore and thereby was added to the Battle of Marathon as the twin founding victories not only of Athens and of Greece but of demokratia.

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Professor Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture emeritus University of Cambridge and Vice-Chair of BCRPM.

 

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"Contested narratives and ownership, museums of the future? Exploring the issues some of us started to raise twenty years ago as if they are new."

Tristram Besterman

17 January 2020

“Tristram Hunt seems to be exploring the issues some of us started to raise twenty years ago as if they are new. Contested narratives and ownership, etc. But a welcome improvement on the monotonously presumptive and culturally hegemonistic voice of Neil MacGregor.” Tristram Besterman

 

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BBC Radio Four, Curating the Future

Origins

Episode 1 of 3
Museums have never been more popular around the world or faced such sustained criticism. While the Louvre enjoys record-breaking visitor numbers, Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island builds a new museum campus for the Middle East and blockbusters from Leonardo to Van Gogh to David Bowie circle the globe, museums are also under challenge. Critics questions historic claims to neutrality, call for the repatriation of colonial-era artefacts and protest over the origins of sponsors' money.
V&A Director Tristram Hunt begins the series by looking back at the origins of some of the world's oldest museums and galleries, including those founded to tell the story of a nation, to display a royal or colonial collection or to promote technical and educational improvement.
At the Tokyo National Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and in conversation with the Director of the Rijksmuseum, Tristram asks how foundational ideals can be managed in the post-colonial contemporary world.

To listen follow the link here.

Museums Are Not Neutral
Episode 2 of 3

Museums and galleries remain hugely popular but also face increasing criticism over who visits, who pays and what's on display.
In an era of identity politics, V&A Director Tristram Hunt asks what future museums have when there is no greater sin than 'cultural appropriation', nationalism and nativism decry the multi-cultural stories that galleries tell, and the role of 'experts' is questioned.
With Directors of museums and galleries in London, Derby and Mumbai, Tristram discusses how best to attract new audiences and whether museums should try to promote social justice, transforming their traditional role. He also considers claims that 'Museums Are Not Neutral', explores the co-curation of exhibitions and asks whether 'lived experience’ is as valuable as curatorial knowledge.

To listen follow the link here

Museum of the Future
Episode 3 of 3

In an increasingly digital world, museums are responding to calls for greater digital access and the potential of immersive technology. With the Directors of the Tate, National Gallery and British Museum, Tristram asks whether digital technology undermines or enhances the role and function of museums and galleries. How important is the aura of authenticity or are visitors now more interested in downloading a Rembrandt or Vermeer ?
And, as financial power heads east to the Gulf and China, Tristram explores the wonders of some of the world's newest museums and galleries asks how older institutions can compete.

To listen follow the link here.

 

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