First published in Aôthen Magazine (2024). The text below is the author’s submitted version; the published version may differ slightly after editing.
After more than 200 years of incessant debate on the collection of sculptures assembled by the 7th Earl of Elgin on the Acropolis of Athens, you can almost say that arguments in favour of sending them back to Greece have assumed a formulaic nature. They must invariably contain copious references to Lord Byron, appeal to the good nature of the reader to hear the plight of an “oppressed” nation, generously spread unqualified terms like “looting” and “stealing”, duly mention the “cleaning scandal”, and attack the “slippery slope” argument by arguing that the Parthenon is a unique case. But above all, whatever the circumstances, they must vigorously deny any credibility to the so-called “firman”.
These are the mandatory ingredients. There are also optional ones: a parallel between the Turks and the Nazis, a depiction of Lord Elgin as a greedy social climber (favoured more by opportunity than by his own wits), commentary on his divorce and contingent financial difficulties, allegations of bribery, and so many more. Try that yourself: ask any large language model to produce an essay on the Elgin Marbles along those lines, and you will be greeted by a text that is virtually indistinguishable from the countless journalistic articles on the same subject you can easily find on the web.
Mr Wexler’s piece in this magazine mixes the mandatory and optional ingredients in his particular recipe, avoiding the more openly polemical bits, and seasoning the whole with a modicum of spicy decolonisation sauce. Alas, for all his evident skill, he cannot escape the original sin affecting all of those ingredients: they are entirely false.
Let’s start with the firman. Though we do not possess the original Turkish document, we know virtually everything about it: who drafted it (Rev.d Hunt), who wrote it (Bartolomeo Pisani), who translated it into Italian (Antonio Danè), what it said (thanks to the translation), who brought it to Athens (the imperial commissary Rashid Aga), who received it (the Voivode and the Chief Judge of Athens) and who acted upon it (the Acropolis commander). Not bad for a “ghost document”, eh? But there is more: John Galt affirms to have seen the Turkish original, and Byron, Dodwell, Mary Nisbet and Hobhouse all mention it as the authority for the removal of the antiquities from the Acropolis. Historians such as William StClair and Edhem Eldem accept the authenticity of the so-called firman as a real historical document, reinforced by references to it in both British and Ottoman official documents from the archives. Also legal scholars like Alexander Herman do not dispute the legal efficacy of the instrument, saying that “on the balance of evidence” any court of law would be bound to find in favour of the UK. In the face of the historical evidence, Elgin’s story holds up pretty well. And why wouldn’t it? Imagine the opposite scenario: a bunch of foreigners waltz into a military base and start taking down building materials, reworking huge marble blocks, shipping everything away for months and with hundreds of hired labourers, and the soldiers there do… nothing? Ludicrous.
The reality is that neither the existence nor “the veracity of the firman” is really in doubt, and any attempt to impeach its legal validity ends up in failure. Bribes? There is literally zero historical evidence to support this. Permission granted by an occupying power? Even more ridiculous. The right of conquest was a prominent feature of international law until well into the 20th century. Occupation is also codified in law as a concept, requiring that its nature be temporary and that the occupied people not switch allegiance in the meantime. Can anyone really maintain (and document) that the people of Athens in 1801 were still loyal -after 343 years- to the Florentine dukes of Athens, the rightful sovereigns of the crusader state created there in 1204 and overrun by the Ottoman conquest in 1458?
Considering the evidence with honesty and impartiality, only one interpretation is possible: the Ottoman government, the legitimate and internationally recognised sovereign authority over Athens, had willingly decided to alienate some bits of public property and give them to the British ambassador as a gift. To sum it up, they did what was in their own right to do. I know that staring at this fact makes us baulk in horror. Yet, we must not make the mistake of thinking that people in Athens two centuries ago had the same kind of regard and sensibility about the cultural heritage we have today. As historians, we have a duty to get to know our subjects, their ideas, and their morals and try to explain with those elements why people from the past made this or that historical choice. The acquisition of the Elgin Collection makes no difference; as a historical fact, it has a context and it may be successfully explained without the use of concepts and norms that were not current in that particular time and place.
The Ottoman documents found by Eldem mention that “there is no harm in ceding” the Marbles to Elgin and that “there is no harm in granting permission for the transport and passage of the said stones”, the main reason being that “stones of this kind, decorated with figures, are not held in consideration among Muslims, but are appreciated by the Frankish states”. From their point of view, they were closing the deal of a lifetime: giving away something that had relatively low value in their eyes while getting political goodwill from a powerful ally in exchange. It wasn’t much different for the Greek-speaking population of Athens. The Archbishop had been very generous with Elgin and his family, gifting them antiquities found in or around various ecclesiastical properties. Ancient monuments did not receive much love from the Orthodox hierarchies, who considered them to be relics of a pagan past that was best ignored by good, God-fearing Christians. Emblematic of this attitude is the case of the temple of Artemis Agrotera on the Ilissos river: the little building, a smaller version of the temple of Athena Nike, was initially converted into a country chapel and seen in this state by Stuart and Revett in 1765. Only three years later, the building had been dismantled with the blessing of the Archbishop so that the building materials could be split, partly used to build a new church and partly passed to the Voivode to reinforce the fortification wall around the city. The leading men of the city, the demogerontes, were all very supportive of Elgin’s mission as it brought a wave of prosperity to the city in the form of wages for the hundreds of labourers needed to move, cut, and transport the heavy marbles slabs.
This attitude should not surprise us too much. In 1801, nobody in Athens shared the appreciation and reverence shown by the Western travellers for the antiquities of the city. The authors of the Greek Enlightenment lament, still in the first decade of the 19th century, how “our people do not have any idea not even of their ancestors” (Sakellarios), noting that “the publication of [Greek] writers is totally new to us” (Korais). This does not mean that there were no protests when Elgin’s men removed the statues and friezes from the citadel: we know there were some from both Greeks and Turks. Yet these protests were not motivated by a genuine antiquarian preoccupation to safeguard a shared heritage seen as the physical embodiment of a common cultural identity (which was instead Elgin’s main preoccupation, in the face of impending dilapidation), but rather by the fear of losing elements impregnated with magical connotations and whose departure could have endangered the welfare and wellbeing of the community. Many travellers recount stories of popular attachment to statues and inscriptions seen as foci of thaumaturgic power, channels of chthonian energies, or guarantors of soil fertility so long as they remained in their place. Some of the stories even support their removal, narrating of ancient spirits chained within the sculptures that could only be set free once away from the lands dominated by the Turks.
For many years, these stories have been brushed off as inventions made by locals to impress gullible Western travellers or even constructs engineered by those same travellers to justify the extraction of antiquities in the name of colonialistic superiority and Eurocentric “scientific” knowledge. The reality is that dismissing these stories is the true colonialistic act, and, as argued by Yannis Hamilakis, it is only by recognising these “indigenous archaeologies” as legitimate modes of knowledge that we truly start to “decolonise Greek archaeology”. Read in this light, the Ottoman gesture of granting Elgin his wish to take away “any pieces of stone with inscriptions and figures” must appear not only legitimate but also fully justifiable and consistent with the culture within which it originates. No imperial strongarming, just a free and mutually beneficial exchange between consenting parties acting as equals. To talk of imperialistic coercion, colonialistic exploitation, and peoples with no voice just to make sense of an act that we cannot possibly contemplate from our point of view here and now would be a failure to recognise that -in the words of L. P. Hartley- “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”, and we should just respect that.
Sure, let’s even accept what happened in the past -I hear you say- but “there is a thing called progress”, to quote a prominent Greek repatriationist. Should we be stuck in a situation whose fundamentals we no longer share just because it may be argued that it made sense two hundred years ago? I shall suggest three reasons why we should.
When it comes to museums, I see two main reasons why we go to great lengths to collect, preserve and display all this “old stuff”, and the choice of reason is dependent on the nature of the object. There are items coming from distant places, in time or space, which we keep to remind ourselves that other ways are possible, to educate our intellects on the idea of diversity. These are usually objects that cannot be reconciled with our own Western cultural identity, like a war drum or a moai. On the other side of the spectrum, there are objects that tell us, one way or another, who we have been, how we used to do things and think about the world. We keep these items to tell us about ourselves. From this second perspective, the Elgin Marbles truly belong in a British museum, as they illustrate aspects of our own culture that are still present today after two and a half millennia of cultural evolution: the beauty of the human form, democratic ideals, the preservation of order from the attack of chaos and entropy. These were the same reasons that prompted Elgin to bankrupt himself in an effort to save what he rightly considered as important relics of our past on the point of being obliterated. Even this effort is a story in its own right, the story of our love and reverence for our ancient past, the Grand Tour, antiquarianism and the birth of scientific archaeology. These are stories of British people (and of all Westerners in general) that you can rightly explore in the British Museum. The Elgin Marbles are not out of place in those rooms; there is a historical and cultural reason why they are there and not still in Athens or converted into dust at the foot of the Acropolis. And since their acquisition, they have been reigniting our cultural discourse time and again, renewing the arts in Britain and beyond (just as Lord Elgin had intended) in a story of Classical reception and reuse that we are still in the process of fully untangling.
Even if you were to struggle in hearing these remarks, even if you -against all evidence to the contrary- still considered the acquisition of the Marbles a robbery and a historical wrong to be righted, I would tell you there is a place for them in our museums. Museums are not just there to enlighten us about what we like about ourselves. They sometimes show us our darkest side and prompt us to confront it, to enter into a dialogue with a difficult past so we can learn a valuable lesson. In our museums, we learn about all the hundreds of different ways we kill each other, we learn about slavery, torture, and humiliation. The items that exemplify those stories are not there as a celebration but as a memento. It would be dishonest of us just to present an edulcorated and idealised version of our history, sanitised and stripped of all the items that make us blush. Contested heritage, when legitimately and legally acquired (as in the case of the Elgin Marbles), is much more valuable as an educational tool in our museums than it would ever be as a celebration in the country of origin.
This last point is even more important when returned heritage is sought as a prop for a narrative that is more ideologic than historical. Museums, because of their role in displaying identity, have deep political connotations and are prime targets for distortions and instrumentalisations. Since the very birth of the modern Greek state, Greek antiquities have been the embodiment of an idea: that the new Greek people are the inheritors of the cultural legacy of the ancient Greeks, passed to them in an unbroken cultural (and genetic) line through the centuries, and justifying their possession of the land that was their forefathers. The new Greeks immediately started to assert control over this legacy of highly symbolic objects, enacting legislation and creating museums, universities and bureaucracies around them. The trouble is that -as Stathis Gourgouris affirms- “the Hellenic civilisation as we know it was in effect the invention of the ‘science of antiquity’, of Classics”. And not just any idea of Classics, but one born and nurtured in that German-speaking world that would express the first kings and elite of the new nation-state. In this framework, the return of the Elgin Marbles would only be a tribute to the desired image of the modern Greeks, one of the missing pieces in the Bavarian propaganda project started by Leo von Klenze when he razed to the ground all the post-Classical history on the Acropolis. It would be the finishing touch to a colonial project the insurgents voluntarily embraced in order to obtain their independence, one which still weaponises the past in order to justify the present.
The Elgin Marbles are where they are legitimately and with reason. Not only have we no cause to remove them from London, but to be authentically anti-colonial and genuinely Philhellenic, we should reject any idea of ever returning them to Athens.
Reading suggestions:
Edhem Eldem, “From Blissful Indifference to Anguished Concern: Ottoman Perceptions of Antiquities, 1799–1869”, in Z. Bahrani/Z. Çelik/E. Eldem (edd.), Scramble for the Past. A Story of Archeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, Istanbul 2011, pp. 281–329
Alexander Herman, The Parthenon Marbles dispute, London 2023
Yannis Hamilakis, “Decolonizing Greek archaeology: indigenous archaeologies, modernist archaeology and the post-colonial critique” in D. Damaskos and D. Plantzos (eds), A Singular Antiquity, Athens 2008, pp. 273-84.
Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, colonisation, and the institution of modern Greece, Stanford 2021.
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