Statement written by Dame Janet Suzman, Chair of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles read out by Danny Chivers during Saturday's BP or not BP? protest at the British Museum.
These unmatched sculptures that you see before you have a home waiting for them. These figures, part of an ancient belief system, have been stranded in the grandest refugee centre you’ve ever seen - the great British Museum itself. But home is where they were created two and a half thousand years ago.
In Athens stands a fine building especially built to house them, and next year this New Acropolis Museum will celebrate its tenth anniversary. On its top floor there are yearning gaps where these very sculptures should be sitting, joined with the other half of the pedimental carvings and in direct sight of the ancient building from which they were chopped, and which, astonishingly, still stands proud on its ancient rock. That fact alone makes these sculptures unique; we can still see exactly where they first displayed themselves, for they were never intended as separate 'works of art', but as part of the mighty whole of Athena’s glorious temple. Who, one wonders, was a mere occupying Sultan to sign away the genius of Periclean Athens?
Now is the time to make a grand and generous gesture to the Greek people who in distant times laid the foundations of our modern democracies and who informed our artistic heritage. No sculptures have ever matched these languishing here. They are unarguably part of a history the Greeks feel profoundly. Modern Greeks may be as distant from their forebears as we to Anglo-Saxons but that never stopped a nation feeling viscerally connected to its antecedents.
Let’s do so by celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Acropolis Museum in 2019 with the return of their prodigals. What a fabulous birthday present that would be! How civilised and decent of the British Museum to divest itself of dated strictures belonging to an era - now so over - of colonialist finders keepers. The time has come to do the right thing. Go BM! Do it!
For more information on BP or not BP, visit here.
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