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Page 1 of 2  While Greece heralds the return of the Olympics, there is one more homecoming it would like to see,..the Elgin Marbles.It was synchronicity of the highest order: an ancestral homecoming for
the Olympics, coinciding with the repatriation of the famously controversial
Parthenon Marbles, the most precious missing pieces of Greek antiquity.
Such was the scale of cultural ambitions as Greece mused through the
various ways it might elevate art to stand alongside sport in its planning for
Athens 2004.
A New Acropolis Museum would be built, it was decided, replete with a
panoramic upper gallery so perfect it would inevitably bring an end to the art
world's most enduring controversy by impelling Britain once and for all to give
back the marble sculptures that were tragically sawn and chiselled two centuries
ago from the upper section of the Parthenon.
Modern Greece may indeed be a last-minute culture, as so many Athenians
have claimed in the rocky run-up to the Games. But in the case of the New
Acropolis Museum, unlike the rest of the Athens 2004 construction projects, no
amount of accelerated effort could get the job done.
Delay begat further delay, and when ground was finally broken on a
1.8-hectare site at the southern base of the Acropolis, digging was halted by
the discovery of Byzantine ruins, and beneath these, further signs of
prehistoric settlement. The courts got involved, and when the size, scope and
location of the foundations were finally settled, any hope that Greece might see
its marbles under the glow of the Olympic flame were gone.
Today, the New Acropolis Museum remains little more than a series of
foundation pilings. And the majority of the contentious sculptures they were to
hold, a series of exquisitely sculpted marble friezes that once adorned the
Parthenon, remain in the British Museum.
"A grand museum such as this is so difficult. Things need their time,"
Elena Korka of the Greek Directorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities
told the Star.
"We anticipated having the marbles here. It would have been a turning
point of incredible importance, because of their symbolism.
"The Olympics are something that rises above the interests of the nation.
Each country exposes its culture and the effect is something broader than
sport."
Korka, an archaeologist, has dedicated much of her effort over the past
18 years to the issue of the Parthenon Marbles. She knows their history, ancient
and modern, by rote.
The sculpted slabs of white Pentelic marble in question were chiselled
in situ almost 2,500 years ago, when the Parthenon was first created as a
tribute to the goddess Athena.
Arguably the foremost monument of Western civilization, the Parthenon's
symmetry and harmony was made complete by these adornments, which comprised a
triad of painstakingly carved metopes, pediments and a 160-metre frieze that
wrapped around the building in a continuous depiction of the Panathenaic
procession.
The structure lasted an astonishing 20 centuries more or less intact
before suffering its first substantial blow when a Venetian raiding party
triggered an explosion of Ottoman munitions stored on the summit within the
columns of the Parthenon.
But the darkest chapter in the Parthenon's history belongs to one Thomas
Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, who used his position as Britain's ambassador
to Constantinople (today's Istanbul) in a determined effort to strip the
Parthenon of its sculpted treasures.
Elgin assembled a team of European draftsmen, ostensibly to create
drawings and plaster cast replicas of the Parthenon marbles. But his three-year
project (1801-1804) eventually devolved into a campaign of ham-fisted pillaging.
Under the authority of a dubious letter Elgin claimed as permission from the
ruling Ottomans, hundreds of crates of marble were shipped to England, including
nearly 90 metres of the continuous band of sculpted frieze around the Parthenon.
Almost immediately upon seizing possession, Elgin's luck turned foul in a
fashion later described by poet Lord Byron as "the curse of Athena." His
marriage dissolved upon his return to Britain, and with it, access to his wife's
fortune. Elgin eventually fled to Paris in failing heath, heavy debt and widely
despised for the manner in which the Greek treasures came into his hands.
Yet the British government agreed, after an investigation into the issue, to
purchase the marbles from Elgin for the agreed upon sum of £35,000 and a
commitment to present them in perpetuity as the Elgin Marbles. That remains
their name today at the British Museum, where they remain the highlight for many
of the six million people who visit the museum each year.
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