Evangelos Kyriakidis of The Heritage Management Organisation and previously lecturer at the University of Kent believes the British Museum needs to see past the legal arguments though.
“The British Museum says there is no legal argument, and I don’t think that is true. But I don’t want to go into the legal argument, as I think the moral argument is much stronger,” he says.
The reason the Parthenon Marbles are such a sticking point for Greece, Kyriakidis argues, is that it’s a national symbol. “Having a Greek national symbol in a museum called the British Museum is totally wrong.
It’s like if the Crown Jewels were in Greece,” he says. The withholding of a key national symbol is elemental to why the British Museum is an anachronistic institution. “The British Museum portrays itself as a global museum, but it’s a remnant of a colonial era.”
Kwame Opoku writes to RM*: PM Sunak is obviously frustrated and has no valid argument to offer the Greeks but such bad behaviour at the highest level of the British government is very disturbing. Paradoxically, the majority of the British are in favour of the return of the Parthenon Marbles to Athens.
Already in 2009, Opoku wrote about British PM insulting the external world: The Amazing Director Of The British Museum: Gratuitous Insults As Currency Of Cultural Diplomacy?,
For Lewis McNaught the main argument for returning the Marbles is not so much whose property it is as well as the duty of reunification of an important World Heritage monument. He writes: In his new book The Parthenon Marbles Dispute, Alexander Herman draws attention to the fact both Great Britain and Greece are signatories to UNESCO’s 1972 World Heritage Convention.
This requires both countries to co-operate and conform with their universal responsibilities to identify, protect and conserve monuments on the World Heritage List. The Acropolis has been on this List since 1987.
