Never mind the Turks, we have proof!

 

One of the most recent headline-grabbing events regarding the Elgin Marbles happened at the end of May this year. Dr Zeynep Boz, a big shot of the Turkish Ministry of Culture who deals with illicit trafficking of cultural heritage, intervened at a UNESCO meeting in Paris to support the Greek claim to the sculptures. 

Talking during the biannual sitting of the "Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation" (ICPRCP), she said the following: 

“We are not aware of any document legitimizing this purchase,” “I don’t think there’s room to discuss its legality, even during the time and under the law of the time.” “We wholeheartedly look forward to celebrating the return of the Sculptures, as we believe it will mark a change of behavior towards the protection of cultural property and be the strongest message given globally,”

The Greeks were obviously melting with glee for the unexpected (?) assist offered by this unlikelyest of allies.  But how much truth is there in this announcement? Is it really the game-changer the Greeks purport it to be? 

Of course not. The first part of the announcement, the one affirming that they "are not aware" of any document, is basically meaningless. To say that since you are not aware of something, then it doesn't exist is the typical logical fallacy called "argumentum ex absentia". Archaeology is full of objects, from everyday items to entire cities, of whose existence nobody "was aware". Does it mean that they don't exist? Does it prove that they cannot exist? Hardly so.

There may be many explanations for the fact that, despite painstaking research in the Imperial Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, Turkish scholars have not found any evidence of the permission given to Lord Elgin at the end of June 1801, which empowered him and his agents to remove sculptures from the Acropolis of Athens. One such explanation is that the research has not been conducted thoroughly. According to all accounts, the Ottoman archives are characteristically disordered, with any research made more difficult by the lack of comprehensive indexes. In these circumstances, unless you proclaim to have read every single piece of paper from top to bottom, you can not really say that you have looked. 

Another explanation is that the document did exist in that archive, but has now been lost or destroyed. The credibility of this particular explanation depends on the presence of other examples of documents whose existence we are certain of and that are now unaccounted for. In the absence of a strong body of evidence documenting the routine loss of documents, it may be difficult to argue that just the exact document you need has been subject to such an unfortunate occurrence. 

A better explanation may be that that particular document was never there in the first place, and therefore, no amount of searches would ever yield it, regardless of the actual state of physical conservation of the document itself. But does this explanation hold water? 

Let's see. According to Rev. Hunt, the firman was carried by him and Mehmet Rashid Aga, an Imperial messenger (called a mubashir), from Constantinople to Athens in mid-July 1801. There, it was immediately presented to the Ottoman governor, the Voivode, and the city's chief judge, the Qadi. This version of the event is also confirmed by Elgin in his testimony to the Select Committee in 1816. 

Both the presence of an imperial commissioner, a trusted court official sent from the Celebi Effendi's office "to ensure that the contents of the firman were obeyed", and the identity of the addressees make it clear that this is official business of the Ottoman administration, following proper channels and protocol, and not just a little favour on the side, scribbled on a piece of paper. To reinforce this impression, we must also consider that the mubashir was bearing also a second letter, written by Hadji Ibrahim Effendi (the Minister of War) to his protege, the Voivode, whose content we ignore but which Hunt tells us was "of more service to me with respect to the Citadel than the Caimakam’s". 

According to both Hunt and Elgin, the original firman was handed over to the Voivode, and there is no reason to believe it was ever handed back to Rev Hunt. After all, this official letter was addressed to the Voivode and the Qadi, and its official status—confirmed by the manner of its delivery—required that it be preserved for future reference in the Voivode's archives, like every other official document of the administration. We know that the document was still in Athens in 1810, when it was allegedly seen by John Galt, who reports the fact in his autobiography, mentioning specifically that he had seen "the Turkish firman" and had it read to him by a local, as he didn't know Ottoman Turkish. 

We know what was written in the firman because Rev Hunt had been prudent enough to order that a translation be prepared for him by the dragoman of the embassy when they were still back in Constantinople. This translation was written in Italian, the lingua franca of the Levant, which was understood by merchants and diplomats working in the area and even by Ottoman officials. But more importantly, it was the language spoken by the artists hired by Lord Elgin to carry out his antiquarian expedition, who had all been recruited in Italy and who were, almost all of them, Italian.  

The Italian translation, often referred to as the "Hunt letter", was brought back to England when Rev. Hunt came back in 1805, and was identified among Hunt's papers by William StClair and finally acquired by the British Museum in 2006. Its authenticity has been confirmed by both StClair and Dyfri Williams, and its content has been deemed consistent with the standard of similar preserved documents by Prof. Edhem Eldem. Even scholars who are deeply opposed to Elgin's mission, such as American legal scholar David Rudenstine, believe it is authentic. Thanks to this letter, we know precisely what Lord Elgin and the artists were authorised to do, and it is impressive how much the content of the letter is corroborated by the existing contemporary accounts and by what actually happened in Athens between 1801 and 1803. 

So what happened to the original Turkish firman then? Nobody knows for sure. But, since there is no reason to believe that it was ever sent back to Constantinople, we must suppose that it stayed in Athens, in the archives of the Voivode. Unfortunately, these archives are not preserved, as they were burned down in 1821 during the Greek revolution, like much of the Ottoman archives in Greece during this tumultuous period. Paper was used for musket cartridges, so when the archives were not destroyed by the fury of the rebels, eager to destroy any records of their obligations towards the Sublime Porte, volumes were often ransacked and reused to make ammunition. 

This story, built upon the extant historical evidence and filled in with reasonable assumptions, explains why it is a fool's errand to continue looking for the Firman where it cannot possibly be and why we will probably never see the original text translated into the "Hunt letter" again.