Forty years after the appearance of the then Greek Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri, who asked the British government to return the Parthenon sculptures to Greece, here we are again: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak canceled a meeting with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis because the latter, in an interview with the BBC -ju, mentioned this request again. Melina Mercouri emphasized the meaning of the Parthenon sculptures for the Greeks, there were words about pride, light, identity, etc., if I remember my article about it correctly. The glorious era, when Greece became a member of the EC without any requirements, harmonization, in the absence of a fair law on minorities, and with a socialist government and a good dose of unresolved recent past. The Greeks were considered the direct heirs of the Hellenes, which has not changed much, and most of the Britons, the more literate ones, felt that they should explain to the Greeks who the Hellenes were. When it was especially necessary, Byron was mentioned, aid to the Greeks in 1827 and the eternal alliance, British philhellenism, the birth and youth of the "Greek" Prince Philip, Elizabeth's husband, the defense of Crete (British defeat and the first Wehrmacht air landing), etc. The interbrigades of disillusioned revolutionaries from all over the world, who wanted to transfer the French Revolution to Greece, Byron's horror in verse at the idea of transferring monuments to England, the terrible military flop in Crete, and especially the role of the British in establishing a military reign after the Second World War, were kept silent. , when they killed the Greek communist partisans with true colonial bloodlust.
As for Thomas Bruce, Earl of Elgin, who started the whole thing by a dubious purchase from the Turkish owners, and by means of saws, axes and ropes took the parts of the Parthenon and transferred them to his estate, the list of his misdeeds is long - except this greatest: of the four ships, three arrived in England; his role in the theft of the materials left behind in Athens, where he died of fever, by the classicist John Treddle - he described and drew the monuments, instead of sawing them; when Elgin was offered money for monuments by the state, he thought it was too little, so he did not give them; he won a large settlement in court from his wife's lover, whom he sued and then nearly went bankrupt. In addition, he contracted some unpleasant illness, and died forgotten and poor in Paris. The Anglo-American term for losing one's marbles refers to marbles, not Elgin's marbles: and that would be nice.
In the debate that flared up in the mid-eighties of the last century, the English tried to "cool down" the emotions of Melina Mercuri, and that in several books. The main arguments were that the monuments, today in the British Museum, are accessible to the public free of charge and every day of the year; that during World War II they survived in the safety of the subway; that the air in London had been thoroughly purified a decade earlier, and that the air in Athens would have left fatal marks on the sculptures and destroyed them quickly. All of that is true, or at least was true. I myself witnessed how the Caryatids ("women from Orahovica" in Serbian) from the Erechtheion lost their faces in twenty years of Athenian smog and had to be replaced. Meanwhile, towards the end of the millennium, the big polluters of Athens were extinguished, the air became better, the rules about visits to monuments much stricter (human sweat is one of the destroying elements). And, most importantly, the new Acropolis Museum was built, with unsurpassed lighting planning and places provided for the missing monuments. Melina Merkuri, besides being pathetic, also had an invincible argument, visible only on the field: nothing can surround the sculptures better than Attic light - yes, exactly Attic, on the tongue between two seas, and especially in the "lavor", as the Athenians call the valley where the capital of Attica and Greece, Athens, is located. British public opinion has also become different, more open and angry: Sunaka is hated by the British almost as much as the Greeks hate Mitsotakis, the rich conservatives are last in terms of persuasiveness in politics, not only in England. The outburst of Sunak at the most inconvenient possible moment interrupted the multi-year diplomatic negotiation about the monuments, which would surely end first with a loan, and then with the permanent stay of the miracle in the place where it was created. The silenced and tearful Muses will have a short holiday in the future, and then everything will continue as before in the world of lost marbles. Let's hope that neither Mitsotakis nor Sunak will attend the celebration.
I belong to the rare breed that roamed freely around the Acropolis on full moon nights, and warmed up on the white stone, wherever it occurred to him. And to those who adored Melina, especially in the role of a prostitute who, after the play of the tragedy in Herod's Odeon, gives her own interpretation, that after some family disagreements, they all went to the sea in the end. And who, in the same film, consoles an offended Rebbe musician who shut himself down and won't continue playing and singing because some silly professor mentioned notes to him, with these words: "Do birds know notes?" Gilles Dassin, born in Odessa to Jewish parents, expelled from the USA as a communist, he mocked in his brilliant film Never Sunday (1960) both the inflated appropriation of Hellenism and the drowning in self-invented spontaneity, because both are the result of colonialism. In addition, he also got Melina. And yet, if you're able to cry for mercy in front of Nika mending a sandal, to recognize notes in birdsong, and to be stuck until dawn in Rebbe's dert, merak, sevdah, inat, glendi, and cheif, you're equipped against colonialism (bonus - and racism and nationalism), including yours.
The Parthenon, while you are in the Acropolis Museum, is in your eye all the time, you see it together with the sculptures, in the reflection on the glass, wherever you turn. More sculptures exposed to view, more Parthenons. It can only be a thorn in the side of those who, like a certain Morozini, would shoot at it, cut it and buy and sell it like Elgin, or patch up internal politics with it, like Sunak and Mitsotakis. And there were those like Manolis Glezos, who in 1941, three days after the flag with the swastika was placed on the Acropolis, climbed the steepest rock with a friend (and at the age of nineteen) and took off the flag in question and tore it: it was a thorn in his side.
Bonus video:
