Campaign Group Ups Efforts to Reunify Parthenon Marbles
UK general elections are drawing closer, and for one cultural campaign group, the Parthenon Marbles lie at the heart of their voting strategy. The hope is to encourage others to think the same way.
The British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM), a campaign group which advocates for reuniting the sculptures in the capital of Greece, has been busy trying to drum up support among the electorate alongside all the political campaigning.
The campaign to reunify the Parthenon Marbles
The group is asking the public—via a small, published plea on its website—to consider the issue of the Parthenon Marbles as they ready to head to polling stations on July 4th.
BCRPM has included a letter template in its plea for people to use when writing to their MP. It states:
“The Parthenon Sculptures, often wrongly referred to as the ‘Elgin Marbles’, have been housed in the British Museum for well over two centuries. During his time as Ambassador, Lord Elgin had taken them from the site without express permission from the occupying Ottoman Sultanate, causing catastrophic damage to an already fragile building.”
It further continues:
“While they have been generally fairly well conserved, their absence from their original context in Athens continues to be a source of significant cultural and emotional distress for many Greeks and dismay for supporters worldwide of cultural repatriation, including, significantly, UNESCO.”
More importantly many major museums including the Louvre, The Rijksmuseum, The Met, the V&A, are seriously intent on returning important post-colonial objects in their collection. The British Museum is in danger of standing alone.”
More specifically, the group is asking UK voters to write to their MP to request an amendment to the Museum Act of 1963, which prevents the return of the sculptures. Amending this legislation would permit the trustees of the British Museum to remove the Parthenon Marbles from the organization’s inventory and repatriate them in Athens.
The campaign group also states on its website that:
“…the assertion by the British Museum on its website that the Parthenon Marbles were legally obtained is unproven and unsafe. The BCRPM therefore states on its own website in the name of balance and objectivity that the legality of the UK government’s acquisition of the Marbles remains entirely unproven.”
The British Museum has always maintained that Lord Elgin had a firman (legal document) from the Ottoman Sultanate, stating that he could remove the marbles, but, speaking at the 24th Session of UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for the Return of Cultural Property to the Countries of Origin (ICPRCP), Zeynep Boz, Head of the Anti-Smuggling Department in Turkey, stated: “It is not to our knowledge the existence of a document that legitimizes the purchase.”
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