‘Hissy fit’: Sunak accused of losing his marbles in centuries-old dispute

London: Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek prime minister known rather blandly for his efficiency, organisational skills and pro-business reforms, jumped head-first into one of the world’s bitterest cultural disputes on arrival in London this week.

Tugging on patriot heart-strings and setting off a proverbial spot fire, he told the host of the BBC’s flagship Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, that the row over the fate of the 2500-year-old Parthenon sculptures had moved beyond ownership to reunification.

A visitor takes a picture of sculptures that are part of the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum in London.Credit: AP

“Where can you best appreciate what is essentially one monument?” asked Mitsotakis, who hails from a Greek political dynasty dating back to the 19th century. “It’s as if I had told you, I’d cut the Mona Lisa in half, and you would have half of it at the Louvre and half of it at the British Museum.”

Mitsotakis added he would keep pushing to return the sculptures, also known as the Elgin Marbles, to Greece and their original setting.

“I’m a patient man, and we’ve waited hundreds of years; I will persist in these discussions,” he said.

The following day, his long-planned one-on-one meeting with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was abruptly cancelled by Downing Street, with the Conservative Party leader said to be “infuriated” by the Greek leader’s comments.

The moon rises in the sky behind the Parthenon at the ancient Acropolis hill, in Athens.Credit: AP

“When requesting a meeting with the prime minister, the Greek government provided reassurances that they would not use the visit as a public platform to re-litigate long-settled matters relating to the ownership of the sculptures,” Sunak’s spokesman said, adding the prime minister felt it would not be productive to hold a meeting dominated by that issue, “rather than the important challenges facing Greek and British people”.

A 200-year cultural disagreement

Two centuries after they were hauled from the ruins of the Parthenon temple in Athens by a British nobleman, the treasures are among the greatest in the British Museum.

The statues went on display in 1817 after they were removed by agents working for Lord Elgin, the then British ambassador to the Ottoman court. Housed in a dedicated room, the sculptures of Olympian gods and goddesses, and centaurs and warriors, are unmatched examples of the artistry and ambition of 5th century BC Athens.

Visitors look at sculptures that are part of the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum in London.Credit: AP

The showstopper is the frieze, a marble relief decorated with men and women in a stately procession, which ran around the 160-metre-long inner colonnade of the Parthenon. Elgin brought 75 metres of it to London, the largest surviving portion.

Greece, which believes the Marbles were stolen by Elgin and belong to the Greek people, wants them returned to the magnificent new Acropolis Museum in Athens. A formal request for their permanent return was first made in 1983.

In May, after Mitsotakis secured about 40 per cent of the vote at the general election, he told the British press: “We will never recognise that these sculptures are owned, legally owned by the British Museum ... But again, we have to be constructive, and we have to be innovative if a solution is to be found.”

Although public and political opinion has shifted, the British have long argued that Elgin legally purchased the Marbles and received a firman (a decree issued by the sovereign in historical Islamic states) from the Ottoman sultan. A long-running defence is that had the Marbles remained in Athens, they likely would have shared the same fate as other ancient sculptures that were destroyed and mutilated.

Britain’s Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer, left, meets with the Prime Minister of Greece Kyriakos Mitsotakis in London.Credit: Getty

A 1963 Act of Parliament stops the museum permanently handing back the sculptures. A string of British governments, including Sunak’s, have vowed not to change the legislation, as has Opposition Leader Sir Keir Starmer, who the polls predict will take office at the next general election.

Starmer, who met with Mitsotakis last week, told him he would not stand in the way of a mooted loan deal involving part of the Parthenon sculptures being sent to Athens. Some have speculated this meeting was the source of Sunak’s “hissy fit”.

A diplomatic blunder or domestic political wedge?

Greek government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis said Sunak’s decision to call off his first bilateral talks with Mitsotakis at the “eleventhth hour” had been “remarkably disrespectful”. Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis, who accompanied Mitsotakis on his trip, was even blunter. “This is unheard of,” he said. “It is a massive diplomatic indiscretion. Even Israel and Hamas communicate.”

Britain’s Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who this week cancelled a meeting with the Greek prime minister.Credit: Getty

European Commission Vice President Margaritis Schinas said it was “as un-British as it gets”.

George Osborne, a former UK chancellor and now chair of the British Museum, has been trying for more than a year to negotiate an innovative loan deal with Mitsotakis that would entail parts of the frieze being loaned to the Acropolis Museum.

In exchange, some Greek treasures would be sent on loan to the museum in Bloomsbury in central London. Over time, different parts of the sculpture would be put on display in Greece.

“I hope we’ll find a way to partner with Greece so that a portion of the Marbles spend part of their time in Athens . . . and we see more of their treasures in return,” Osborne wrote in The Spectator earlier this month.

Some believe Sunak’s snub this week was less about the Marbles and more an attempt to paint the Labour leader Starmer as either unpatriotic or weak.

“It is clear that Sunak is in a bind, under pressure ahead of the upcoming elections and that pressure led him to this diplomatic transgression,” Tassos Hadjivassiliou, a foreign policy aide to Mitsotakis, told The Times.

Former British foreign secretary William Hague said it was “not a great advert for diplomacy” as others accused Sunak of handing Labour a “free hit”.

He told Times Radio that the meeting with Mitsotakis should have gone ahead because the two countries had a “heck of a lot more [to talk about] than the Elgin Marbles”. But he insisted Sunak was a “very calm, rational guy” and would not have cancelled the meeting without good reason.

A matter of trust?

Since the days of Lord Byron, the romantic poet who was an early critic of their removal, the fate of the Marbles has been bitterly contested.

Both sides of the debate appeal to a kind of cultural nationalism. They have become part of Britain’s cultural heritage and have been displayed prominently in the heart of London so that every year, more than 6 million visitors from around the world can study, appreciate and copy their workmanship at close range.

Boris Johnson, while prime minister, said: “Those gods and heroes came to our country in 1812 as refugees from the Ottoman kiln. They were going to be melted down to make cement.”

Inside the New Acropolis Museum in Athens.Credit: Shutterstock

There are fears within the British establishment that the only way the Marbles could ever be temporarily returned to Athens is if there was a cultural version of a hostage swap, where Athens loaned Greek treasures to London as “collateral”.

It could be a political problem for Mitsotakis to accept a loan of what he regards as Greek property, but the British Museum could agree to ship to Athens potentially one-third or more of the Marbles for a set time, such as 10 years. But earlier this year, Richard Lambert, Osborne’s predecessor as British Museum chair, told the Financial Times: “My assumption was that once loaned, they would not come back.”

Last year, Italy returned a fragment from the Parthenon that for more than 200 years had been on display at a museum in Sicily. And in December, the Vatican announced it would give three Parthenon fragments to the leader of the Greek Orthodox Church, who is expected to pass them onto the Acropolis Museum.

Momentum on the side of Athens

David Hill, the former chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has gained widespread global recognition for his unwavering advocacy for the return of the Parthenon sculptures. He said Sunak’s behaviour had diminished Britain’s position and only strengthened that of Greece.

“More has happened on the return of the Parthenon sculptures in the last two years than during the last 200 years,” said Hill, a one-time chair of the International Association for the Return of the Parthenon Sculpture.

“Now we have negotiations directly between the chairman of the British Museum and the prime minister of Greece – it’s unprecedented and encouraging.”

He said a major boost was also the about-face of Britain’s two major conservative newspapers, The Times, and The Telegraph which have both editorialised in favour of the Marbles’ return.

“I don’t think they can go resile from that position,” he said.

He said a measure of how quickly and how far British public opinion has changed on this issue was revealed when last year The Sunday Times showed almost 80 per cent of readers now supported the sculptures’ return.

“A YouGov opinion poll showed recently the British public – by a ratio of almost three to one – supported that step.”

Hill said it was not often in history that a great wrong can’t be righted.

“They can be returned where they belong – to Greece. At the end of the day, it’s wrong for the British to keep them there … and I’m confident … that eventually right will prevail,” he said.

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