The Elgin Marbles

It looks like the British Museum has run out of excuses for keeping its cache of stolen property known as the Elgin Marbles.

The long-running reason for not returning the 253 sculptures, which Lord Elgin lifted from Athen’s Parthenon in 1861 and sold to the museum, was that the Greeks didn’t care enough to take proper care of them.

Greece’s new 226,000-square-foot, $200 million state-of-the-art museum at the base of the Acropolis answers that charge. But the answer came long before.

Consider this: when the Turks, who occupied Athens in the early 1800s, ran out of bullets in battling the Greeks and began melting down the Parthenon's 2,300-year-old lead clamps for bullets, Greek soldiers sent bullets to the Turks to stop the defacing. So much for the Greeks not caring.

Indeed, if anyone can be faulted for careless, it’s the British Museum. William St. Clair, a British authority on the Elgin Marbles, told the London Observer some 10 years ago about a British Museum cover-up he discovered in the diaries of museum official Roger Hinks, which disclosed that the antiquities had been badly damaged at the museum.

Apparently, London's polluted air ate away at the marble because the museum didn't use proper air-quality filters until 1962. St. Clair also blamed the museum for a bungled cleaning in 1938 when metal scrapers were used to scrub the marble to an alabaster white in order to demonstrate classical perfection.
To mask the damaged surface, the museum coated the carvings with wax.

The cleaning was ordered by Lord Duveen of Milbank, the British Museum's benefactor, who, St. Clair said, made his fortune retouching old masters and selling them to gullible Americans.

Given all this, shouldn't the British Museum return the marbles? The answer would be easy if Elgin's robbery occurred after 1954. That's when an international convention was adopted requiring all art expatriated in times of war to be returned. A similar convention was adopted in 1970. It was on that basis that Iraq returned what it took from Kuwait's museum in 1990. In that spirit, while the Seattle Art Museum didn’t have to, it agreed to return a painting by Henri Matisse to the heirs of an art dealer whose collection the Nazis stole in France during World War II.

Clearly, my sympathies lie with the effort that Melina Mercouri made in 1983 when, as Greek minister of culture, she pleaded with the English to return the Elgin Marbles. As she famously said, “You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us. They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are our noblest symbol of excellence. They are a tribute to the democratic philosophy. They are our aspirations and our name. They are the essence of Greekness. In the world over, the very name of our country is immediately associated with the Parthenon.”

That said, though, I think there must be a statute of limitations on stolen goods, the cutoff on art being before 1954, when the rules were set.