The British Prime Minister refuses to discuss the marble statues of the Parthenon temple, which Greece wants Britain back.
Last winter, reported that Greece and Britain were finally reaching a compromise in the dispute regarding the ownership of the marble statues in the Parthenon temple. However, the latest twist has torn the dispute wide open.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sun too was to meet his Greek official brother Kyriakos Mitsotakis in London on Tuesday. Sunak canceled the meeting at the last minute after hearing that Mitsotakis was going to put the statue dispute on the agenda.
This, in turn, refused the meeting offered instead by the deputy prime minister of Oliver Dowden with.
According to the representative of the British government, Greece and Britain had agreed not to intervene in the statue dispute during the Prime Minister’s meeting and thus bring it to the public again. Greece denies such an agreement.
Mitsotakis must also have annoyed the British government interview on the BBC. He compared the fate of the statues to the Mona Lisa painting being cut in half. Minister of Labour Adonis Georgiadis later added that all 11 million Greeks share the Prime Minister’s view.
“Old-time culture war”
British Ambassador Lord Elgin took more than half of the sculptures from the 2,400-year-old temple on the Acropolis hill with him at the beginning of the 19th century. Later, when he was short of money, he donated them to the British Museum. The British call them Elgin marbles.
Lord Elgin justified his action with his love of art and said that the statues were safer in Britain than in a dilapidated temple. He also said that he received an export permit from the then Turkish authorities in Athens.
According to a representative of Sunak’s conservative government, the prime minister’s position is firm: the Elgin marbles belong to the British Museum. The government has no intention of changing the law that prohibits tampering with the British Museum’s collections, the representative says.
The former Minister of Culture leading the British side of the negotiations on the statue Lord Vaizey compares the situation to the culture wars of old.
– In them, anyone who dared to consider Britain’s history as anything other than perfect was in some way unpatriotic, Lord Vaizey said in a BBC radio interview.
He supports the director of the British Museum George Osborne compromise proposal and says he didn’t know about Sunak’s position. Osborne has proposed that the British Museum lend the marbles to Greece and in return receive items that have never been seen in Britain.