"Last night I stood by the head and stroked its wild white nose; its like a ghost nosing its way into our world saying science is king. It's amazing.
Every mark and notch is there: the scrub damage from wire cleaners (BM) to what might be chisel marks to the mysterious cleavage on its skull which no-one knows what is or why its there.
It's the modern world whinnying 'hi' to the ancient. It's snow white like the BM's unconscious bias. But that Pentelic marble has iron in it so it would oxidise and slowly change its colour, get a suntan, were it left outside in the Attic sun. It would turn grey with depression and filth were it left outside in Bloomsbury, with a continuous Brit cold dripping from its flaring nostrils.
Roger Michel spoke with assurance and optimism.
Friend Simon Jenkins was there too. Both Michel and Jenkins think George Osborne is keen on legacy and may surprise us. The Trustees are reflective. Something has started."

Janet Suzman, Chair of BCRPM

photo credit:Evdoxia Lymperi

The unveiling at the Freud Museum was also covered on ITV News last night.

Article in artnet news from yesterday, 01 November where Vittoria Benzine writes: "Meanwhile, repatriation negotiations between the British Museum and Greek government are allegedly underway."

In the Times today, more on page 15 from arts correspondent David Sanderson. Willian Hague ommenting on one of the longest feuds in art history is quoted as saying: “I would have thought rational people would have come to a deal on this.” And, GeorgeOsborne earlier this summer spoke about a possible deal and a partnership between the UK and Greece to share the sculptures.

On the letters page of The Times, page 26: 

Robot-carved head
Sir, On the evidence of your photo of the robotically produced marble facsimile of the Parthenon sculpture of a horse’s head (news, Nov 1), the British Museum would be wise indeed to tell the Oxford-based Institute of Digital Archaeology to keep its pirated replicant artefact — its surface is dull, dead and without history.
Michael Daley
Director, ArtWatch UK

We would add that this replica isn't dull (see Janet's comments above), it is very white but wasn't that something that the BM alo strived to do with the sculptures, scrubbing them to make them whiter? And right now it is without history, simply because it is new. Would it not be exciting for the BM to start a new chapter and be part of the history that this specific sculpture may bring to those that venture into Room 18? Right now and for some decades, a fraction of the BM's total visitors go into Room 18, and  they don't linger for very long. 

Tonight at the Freud Museum in Hampstead, London, the unveiling of a Parthenon sculpture carved from the same Greek marble used on the originals 2,500 years ago. The sculpture of a horse’s head, carved by robots from marble provided Mount Pentelicus, Greece, is a replica of one of half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures held by the British Museum since Lord Elgin took them from the  Athens in the early 19th century.

The Oxford-based Institute for Digital Archaeology (IDA) created the replica of the horses head, the chariot horse of the goddess Selene, currently in the British Museum from a one-tonne chunk of marble from the same quarry on Mount Pentelicus that Phidias used in the 5th century BC.

The IDA tweeted yesterday: 

Roger Michel, the founder of the IDA, had recently spoken to George Osborne, the British Museum chairman, about displaying the replicas, adding that this had not been ruled out. More on this inThe Times . 

"I found the UCLA/Getty program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage with the presentation by Roger Michel, the Executive Director of The Institute for Digital Archaeology very  interesting. Especially Roger Michel's longish parenthesis on the ‘whiteness mania’ of the British Museum. It’s Britishness stronger than the ‘Museumness' of it.

The BM discarding its old tropes so it moves into the zeitgeist of the 21stC, the sheer quality of objects from Athens they could then have to show, once the Marbles are where they have to be, and Roger's unexpected optimism about George Osborne himself. That surprised me. Of course I am learning all the time.

I find myself much more taken with the positives that could occur once the dam wall is breached than who did what when; things move so fast now. " Janet Suzman, Chair of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM).

We of BCRPM welcome the recent formation of the campaigning unit The Parthenon Project (PP), funded by Greek national Mr John Lefas and supported in Britain by Lord Vaizey, a former Culture Minister in the Tory-led UK Coalition Government of 2011-2015. Happily for the Reunification cause, and unusually for many Ministers of Culture, Media and Sport, Ed Vaizey responds very positively to the preservation of culture and has declared himself strongly in favour of The Parthenon Marbles returning to Greece. Stephen Fry is also a supporter of John Lefas’ efforts and his generous expenditures on behalf of what was originally dubbed “Lost My Marbles” and is now more soberly named The Parthenon Project. Victoria Hislop, also a member of BCRPM, stands with her friend Fry in support. Their celebrity is a huge plus in efforts to excite press coverage.  The PP is in colloquy with the Hellenic Prime Minister, as we understand it, but as yet the British government has made no efforts to be responsive.

Clearly both organisations, along with others,  share the conviction that there are positively no good reasons for The British Museum to hang on to those Marbles taken illicitly two centuries ago from the standing remains of the Parthenon by Lord Elgin. We wish to emphasise that BCRPM is solely interested in the liberation of these sculptures and bas reliefs, and we do not intend to agitate for any other figures that Elgin illegally shipped out. This policy coincides with the clear wishes of the Government of Greece which requires the return of the Parthenon sculptures only.   

Where best for the Parthenon Marbles? (LSE 17 October 2022), panel organised by the Hellenic Observatory (Professor Kevin Featherstone.) with Lord Ed Vaizey (‘Parthenon Project’) & Dr. Tatiana Flessas (LSE)

Thanks to Kevin Featherstone, to the Hellenic Observatory, to the audience both online and in person (esp. High Commissioner of Cyprus, Andreas Kakouros, an LSE graduate, in person).

I am an honorary citizen (epitimos dêmotês) of modern Sparti, but don’t have the honour to have been born a Hellene. I am, however, a devoted phil-Hellene, consciously following in the footsteps of Lord Byron, and for 60+ years I’ve been trying to turn myself into something as close as possible to a true Hellene. I started learning ancient Greek at 11, modern Greek at 23, I read Greats (Classics) at Oxford 1965-9, I completed an Oxford DPhil thesis on early Spartan archaeology and history under (Sir) John Boardman (1969-75), I taught ancient Greek history and archaeology at 4 universities, for over 40 years in all (1970-2014), I am currently A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College Cambridge and President of the UK’s Hellenic Society. In 2021 I was lucky enough to be promoted Commander (Taxiarchês) of the Order of Honour (conferred by the President of Greece). But in tonight’s context I am above all Vice-Chair, BCRPM, and Vice-President, IARPS.

The British Committee (BCRPM) is almost 40 years old. It was founded in 1983 in response to the heroic initiative of Ms Melina Mercouri, then Culture Minister in Greece’s PASOK government. The BCRPM is now one of altogether some 19 national committees outside Greece. It was not however the first: that honour belongs to the Australian Commttee ( IOC-A-RPM) co-founded and chaired by Emanuel J. Comino (now 89, originally from the island of Kythera). The IARPS is rather younger, founded in 2005 and now chaired by Belgian archaeologist Dr Kris Tytgat. I am not sure whether I am actually a founder member of BCRPM, but I am certainly an early member, and well recall being invited to join, through my Cambridge (and Clare) colleague Prof. Anthony Snodgrass, and meeting with the likes of Eleni Cubitt, Prof Robert Browning, and MPs Eddie O’Hara and Chris Price, giants all.

My point is this: I’ve been actively campaigning for at first the ‘restitution’ and now the ‘reunification’ of the Parthenon Marbles/Sculptures back in Athens – all of them that still reside outside the Acropolis Museum, not just those in the BM – for almost 40 years. There’s no argument therefore or twist of argument for their retention outside Greece, esp. those in the BM, that I have not heard, all of them of course fatally flawed. On the other hand, I’ve been gladdened and heartened to watch over the years the steady – and lately far more lively and vigorous – growth of support for our reunification campaign, especially from among the ‘great British public’. I’ll come back to that. First, why the change in terminology from ‘restitution’ to ‘reunification’?

I’m no lawyer myself (though I happen to be surrounded by them at home), but it seems clear to me, as it always has been to BCRPM and IARPS, that ‘restitution’ has at least overtones of legalism and legality and therefore of ownership. I hardly need point out that all attempts to go down the legal route to reunification not only have manifestly failed in (or not in) the courts but have merely muddied the campaign waters, by raising precisely that ‘ownership’ red herring. I don’t mean to imply that the legal issue of Lord Elgin’s and so the British state’s and so the British Museum’s title to the Marbles is not important. It is. Indeed, I’ve just been reading in draft a wonderful forthcoming book by a French human rights lawyer to the effect that in international law the UK probably does not have much of a case. What I do mean by called ownership a red herring is that we campaigners should steer very clear indeed of resorting to legal argument or action in the present and for the future.

To be very personal for a moment: I was very kindly sent personally by Mr John Lefas (founder and funder of the Parthenon Project) a copy of Who Owns History? by Geoffrey Robertson (then) QC. That was in 2019, but I confess I couldn’t bring myself to read it then, as I was too upset by Mr Lefas’s and Mr Robertson’s involvement in (costly and fruitless) legal action. Instead, I clung on all the more fiercely to (my Oxford contemporary and fellow activist) Chris Hitchens’s The Parthenon Marbles, which in its 3rd edition (Verso, 2008) came with a Preface by Nadine Gordimer and excellent essays by Robert Browning (on the chequered history of the Parthenon as a building over the centuries) and by Charalambos Bouras (on restoration works conducted since the mid-1970s).

Why did I choose to join and campaign actively for the BCRPM all those years ago? Why do I choose still actively to campaign? Before I state them, I would like to emphasise that my reasons, being those of an academic with skin in the game of Hellenic cultural history over many years from antiquity to modernity, will not necessarily coincide completely even with those of my fellow BCRPM members. They are basically two (or three). First, moral-imperative; second, academic-aesthetic. The context and the main act of removal of Parthenon Marbles from Athens (by Lord Elgin and his cohorts from 1801) did not then and does not now reflect well on the standing of Britain as a sovereign nation – as Greece of course in the early 19th century was not.

It is to this day a shameful nonsense that not only do large parts of an original whole (the unique frieze) remain divided between London and Athens but that even individual sculptural members (a metope, say, or a pedimental sculpture) still are too. Members which, I must stress, are not ‘merely’ art objects – as if carved by Pheidias for display in an ancient Uffizi – but much much more than that (especially as regards their original religious-political dimension). Then, there is the wider, deeper, altogether even more problematic issue of politics – not academic politics, but governmental, and interstate, cultural politics. For reunification will require eventually at least one Act of the UK Parliament, and I need hardly remind this academic audience that it behoves us, as a (still, just) liberal-democratic polity in an increasingly un- or anti-democratic, illiberal world, to promote soft, cultural, interstate diplomacy in every positive way we possibly can.

Towards which goal I detect a number of promising straws in the recent wind. The latest yougov. poll. The return of Parthenon fragments from Heidelberg and Palermo (though not yet from my own Cambridge). The recruitment of several prominent journalists to the reunification campaign. The success of the parallel Benin Bronzes and other (imperial/stolen) African objects repatriation campaigns, especially in France (itself once, like Britain, a colonial/imperial power, indeed a once competing power – hence, in significant part, Elgin’s ability to loot, plunder and destroy as he did). The latest (November 2021) UNESCO resolution on cultural property. Finally – and by no means least – the Parthenon Project and its ‘front man’ Ed VaIzey, himself a recent convert to the reunification cause (echoing the published views of a couple of former BM Trustees). Lord Vaizey’s very recent debate in the UK House of Lords focused quite rightly on the National Heritage Act of 1983 and rightly provoked several comments to the effect that we in Britain must do ‘the right thing’ by the Marbles.

Two final points. First ‘Parthenon Marbles’. To clear up any possible confusion, it really is the repatriation of only the marbles/sculptures wrenched from one particular building (still there) on the Acropolis of Athens, the Parthenon, that the Greek Government – and therefore BCRPM and IARPS – are requesting, in particular of the BM. Don’t get me wrong – I too love much of the BM (though I am sometimes tempted to call it the British Imperial War Museum). But quite apart from their holding on to the Parthenon Marbles illicitly and immorally and quite probably illegally, the Trustees – and Curators - are guilty of mounting a simply disgraceful display in the (infamously named) Duveen Gallery. Ironically, just how wrong and how bad it is (and always has been since 1962) was brought home to me by my Cambridge colleague, Dame Mary Beard, in her excellent little 2002 Parthenon book. Ironically, because she just happens now to be a BM Trustee.

Final final point. Oh – I nearly forgot… to answer the question posed by this LSE debate. ‘Where best for the Parthenon Marbles?’ It’s a no-brainer. In the newish (founded 2009) Acropolis Museum. The clue is in the name. The Parthenon is a building essentially of as well as on the Athenian Acropolis. In Athens, in the dedicated Parthenon Gallery of the Acropolis Museum the remaining Parthenon sculptures that the Museum holds are arranged so that they face outward, as they have always done. Their alignment is accurate, they are bathed in Athenian light, and viewed against the Parthenon itself and the Acropolis. At night, the glass surfaces of the Museum afford dynamic comparisons, reflecting the sculptures against the illuminated Parthenon and Acropolis. In the Acropolis Museum, and only there, it is possible properly to understand and appreciate the sculptures close to their original environment, where light, clouds, rain, and outcrops of marble all add to the story. In Athens, moreover, visitors approach the sculptures in a correct sequence, having been prepared for the ultimate glory of the Parthenon by first traversing and viewing up close works that both reflect and encapsulate the whole connected history of the Acropolis up to the Parthenon’s date, the latter half of the 5th century BCE.

Professor Paul Cartledge, Vice-Chair of BCRPM & IARPS

This event was a panel discussion about the cultural repatriation of national treasures, inspired by the current status of the Parthenon Marbles.The event was held at the LSE by the Hellenic Observatory.

The debate over the reunification of the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles remains newsworthy. With attention post the Black Lives Matter protests signalling initiatives taken to return national treasures to their countries of origin, the campaign continues. For the Marbles, the British Museum has signalled a willingness to consider 'a deal', and the Greek Prime Minister highlighted Greece's willingness to discuss this further. He was due to visit the UK next month and have talks with UK's PM, although he did try to do this when Mr Johnson was PM too, gaining the support of UK audiences with his appearance on ITV's Good Morning Britain,16 November, 2021.

The panel that spoke on 18 October, considered the implications of reuniting the Marbles back to Athens and the issues that would arise should such a maganimous act take place any time soon.

Listen to Professor Paul Cartledge, BCRPM and the IARPS's Vice-Chair, alongside Ed Vaizey Chair of a new campaign the 'Parthenon Project', and Dr Tatiana Flessas, Associate Professor in Cultural Heritage and Property Law at the LSE. You can also revisit the talk that Dr Flessas gave on 09 October 2019 at the seminar held at the City of London University alongside BCRPM's Oliver Taplin, Jonathan Jones from the Guardian and Dr Florian Schmidt-Gabain, Attorney, Zurich, Lecturer in Art Law, Universities of Basel and Zurich.

Whichever side of the fence you may be sitting by, there is no doubt that the compelling moral and ethical reasons for reunificaton are as strong today as they were in June 2009, when the Acropolis Museum was opened. Considering also that the first request was made when Greece became indepependent, a request by the morden state of Greece to the UK, nearly two centuries ago.

Greece's requests have never waned garnering greater impetus through UNESCO's ICPRCP also. Yet the BM have remained firm in not wanting to reunite the marbles, that is up until this summer, when the new Chair of the British Museum Trustees, George Osborne suggested to Andrew Marr on LBC that a 'deal' could be made. This deal rests on Greece accepting to share half of the surviving, fragmented sculptures, and would be formalised as a loan agreement that would enable parts of the sculptures to travel back and forth with fragmented pieces currently held in the Acropolis Museum doing the same. With over 100,000 Greek artefacts in the BM, surely there are other exemplars to display in Room 18 which might allow Greece's justifiable request to be met with magnanimity, understanding and empathy? And let's also not forget that since Greek Minister of Culture Evangelos Venizelos in 2000 visited the BM, Greece pledged that should the Parthenon sculptures be returned, the Greek Government would make sure that the Duveen Galleries would always host Greek antiquities on loan for exhibitions. Greece would be willing to send rare and even newly discovered antiquities, which have never been seen outside Greece. This Greek offer has been repeated, and most recently by PM Mitsotakis when he was last in London.