Give them back. For goodness’ sake, just give them back. In June I spoke to George Osborne, now chair of the trustees at the British Museum (though he has, I believe, some other jobs as well). I asked him about the Parthenon marbles, known in Britain as the Elgin marbles – the largely headless, armless frieze of chunky men, draped women and confused-looking horses created by Phidias (Plutarch tells us) around 430 BC.
Much of it now resides not above Athens’s most famous war memorial and civic bank but in an echoing, grey chamber in the British Museum. That’s because the Parthenon, after being converted into a mosque under Turkish rule, had been used as a munitions dump and partly blown up in 1687. In 1800, Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin, employed a team of artists to sketch the ruins, and claimed the following year he had instructions from the Turkish authorities to remove them for safekeeping. Eventually Bruce took them to London. It’s not true that this was considered acceptable at the time: among others, Lord Byron protested vociferously at the vandalism and theft.
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