A recent visit by Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in London, appears to have reignited the debate around the demand for return of the Parthenon Marbles in the British press.
The Greek PM raised the issue in his meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
A few days later and major outlets The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian have published articles directly supporting arguments for the repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles.
READ MORE: Mitsotakis raises issue of Parthenon Marbles in Downing Street talks
Adding to the coverage, the attention brought to the debate was accentuated by a public opinion poll suggesting the majority of British people are in favour of the return.
According to the Telegraph, a 56 per cent of people who participated in the poll by pollsters YouGov stated that they should be exhibited in Greece, while only one in five people (20 per cent) said they should remain in the United Kingdom.
The newspaper’s Associate Editor Gordon Rayner, who interviewed Mitsotakis ahead of his visit to the UK, penned a piece highlighting the fact that pressure on the matter does not come exclusively from the Greek side, but also from UNESCO’s cultural heritage panel, which recently said that their return to Greece is a transnational issue.
This observation, says the Telegraph, seems to weaken Boris Johnson’s justification that UK ministers cannot get involved in the matter because the Parthenon Marbles belong to the British Museum.
Greece’s stance, the Telegraph continues, is also strengthened by an apparently growing trend among major European museums in favor of returning antiquities and artefacts seized from third countries.
Speaking to the outlet, the head of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles Janet Suzman said:
“The British Museum’s argument [that if a cultural treasure is returned to any one country more countries will follow suit] no longer reflects reality,” instead, Suzman points out a ‘finders-keepers’ mentality.
In the same vein, the Guardian’s coverage was also in favour of the Greek side.
A British government will, eventually, return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece, the Guardian’s columnist and author Simon Jenkins wrote on Saturday.
Jenkins argues that there are plenty of examples of large museums having returned important exhibits to their countries of origin and urges UK PM Boris Johnson to follow suit.
The debate over the repatriation of important objects of art, says Jenkins, has acquired a fresh dimension thanks to the development of 3D printing, a technology that allows for exact copies of ancient artefacts, using even the same type of stone or marble.
With Greeks eager to see the original cultural treasures return to the Acropolis Museum, he argues, copies could replace the sculptures exhibited at the British Museum today.