Some deals take months to build and minutes to blow. For Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, it took less than 10 minutes of airtime on the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg show to infuriate his British counterpart, and thus to destabilise a long-drafted British Museum deal to offer a temporary return to Athens for the Elgin Marbles, as part of a museum loan.
Rishi Sunak was so angered by Mitsotakis’s decision to publicly claim the Marbles that he cancelled a planned meeting during the Greek PM’s London trip. The stakes got higher on Tuesday afternoon, with Education Secretary Gillian Keegan asserting in an ITV interview that “the Elgin Marbles are actually protected under law and under that law they have to stay in the British Museum”.
This is a significant change of rhetoric after months of careful trust-building overseen by former chancellor George Osborne, now Chair of the British Museum.
Was Sunak’s decision “petulant”, as many have dubbed it? Undoubtedly. Mitsotakis may have promised not to discuss the issue, as Downing Street claims, but no practising politician could have seriously expected him to self-censor on the Anglo-Greek issue uppermost in the minds of his voters. Worse, this noisy row raises the subject just at a time when Conservatives – and all who oppose the deconstruction of the British Museum collections – are losing the argument in the court of public opinion.
For those of us who queried modern Greece’s claim to the Elgin Marbles – themselves only a subset of the “Parthenon Marbles” friezes, which once formed part of the Parthenon Temple and the Acropolis of Athens – our argument used to go a little like this…
In the fifth century BC, the Parthenon was constructed in Athens and the friezes, decorated in gold and vividly painted, formed an integral part. They were structural components of a building, to be viewed and experienced within the geometry of that building, against the landscape. In their vibrant colours, they looked nothing like they do today.
That experience cannot be recreated, as the curator Tiffany Jenkins argues in her superb book, Keeping Their Marbles. Any claim by the modern Greek state that they can rebuild the Parthenon is absurd. What we are fighting about is whether these relics, clues to what once was, can give us those clues better in British museum or a Greek museum. At present, half are already in Athens, half in London, with a few scattered around the world.
Who is legally in the right? Few deny that Lord Elgin paid the Ottoman Empire for the right to excavate them and then sold them legally to the British government. The moral issues are far thornier, however. The Ottoman Empire was an occupying force in Athens – it is a central tenet of modern Greece that the Ottomans sold their “birthright” without authority.
During the days of the Ottoman Empire, there is a wealth of evidence that the Marbles decayed, unpreserved. Whether that entitled Elgin to “rescue” them is more questionable. But when Greek nationalists expelled the Ottomans, they showed just as little deference to the Ottoman architectural legacy. Those who support the return of the Elgin Marbles to the Acropolis in the name of decolonisation might ask themselves why, instead, they are not clamouring for it to be restored to its sacred Ottoman purpose – as a mosque.
Since its inception, the modern Greek state has effected the erasure of past cultures in the area, in the name of its own vision of a 3,000-year-old Greek history. (Hence the ongoing culture wars over who gets to claim the term: “Macedonia”.) They did so in partnership with a German dynasty which became the new royal family.
As the classicist – and noted lefty – Mary Beard writes, “it was the Bavarian monarchy, looking for legitimation and bringing its own traditions of investment in ancient Greek culture, that made the connection between classical antiquities and Greek nationhood absolute”. The German-Greek association continued in the 20th century, when the whiteness of classical Greek statues, shorn of their original colour, were widely appropriated as models for Aryan fascism.
Why, defenders of the British Museum have argued, should we be caving to Greek ethno-nationalism? Why is the “decolonisation” brigade getting behind a monocultural, ultra-conservative vision of the European tradition?
As I say, our argument used to go like this. This year, events at the British Museum wrecked any argument based on superior British conservatorship, or a more enlightened vision of history. After a series of valuable items went missing and surfaced on eBay, it has become harder to argue that the British Museum is a worthy custodian of even a safety pin.
Meanwhile, as the narrative of decolonisation and anti-imperialist orthodoxy takes hold in the younger generation, the museum seems to have given up making the argument. Osborne’s decision to open talks with Greece fatally undermined the principle that the museum should be proud to host these sculptures.
Whatever the future holds, our culture sector faces a fundamental question: what is the purpose of a museum? Contemporary Britain doesn’t seem to have an answer. Against a zeitgeist which rejects acquisition as capitalist greed, the great collections seem to have given up justifying their existence. The idea that we can “restore” objects as they belonged in a set time and place remains a fallacy.
Nonetheless, Sunak can throw his toys out of the pram all he likes. The Greeks have already conquered British minds.