British Museum

On June 20, Greece and the world museum community celebrated the 10th anniversary of the inauguration of the Acropolis Museum in Athens. The state-of-the-art museum is rightly regarded as a defining structure that has established a dialogue, across time and space, between the sculptural works it houses and the Sacred Rock itself.

Greek singer-songwriter Hellena performed her latest composition, "The Parthenon Marbles - Bring Them Back" in a protest at the British Museum's Room 18 on Thursday afternoon, the Athens-Macedonia News Agency (ANA-MPA) has reported.

An old letter written by late British art historian Kenneth Clark reveals that the former British Museum Trustee had argued in favor of the return of the Parthenon sculptures.

Drawing on data gleaned from 19th century Ottoman archives, Acropolis Museum director Dimitrios Pandermalis has challenged claims by the British Museum that Lord Elgin had obtained permission from the sultan when Greece was under Turkish rule to transfer the Parthenon Marbles from Athens to London.

President Prokopis Pavlopoulos today demanded the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum and blasted Lord Elgin's hacking off of the magnificent sculptures as an act of cultural vandalism.

Greece's president called on Monday for Britain to free the Parthenon marbles from the "murky prison" of its national museum, upping the rhetoric in a near 200-year-old campaign for the sculptures' return.

In response to recent remarks by British Museum director Hartwig Fischer that the Parthenon Marbles will never be returned to Greece, Dame Janet Suzman, chair of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, insisted on Saturday they are in the wrong space and in need of the Attic light and blue skies.

When the director of the British Museum, Dr Hartwig Fischer, recently declared that it was the fiduciary owner of the Parthenon Marbles and that their displacement to the British Museum was a "creative act," the reaction was swift. For many, the British Museum was displaying an arrogance still rooted in an imperialist mind-set.

The British Museum is not the legal owner of the Parthenon Marbles and therefore the long-running dispute with Greece over their fate could only be resolved with their unconditional repatriation and not with a lending plan, the director of the Acropolis Museum, Dimitrios Pandermalis, reportedly told German public radio on Wednesday.

The director of the British Museum, Hartwig Fischer, insisted in an interview published by Greece's Ta Nea newspaper on Saturday that Greece is not the legal owner of the Parthenon Marbles and ruled out the possibility of an open-ended loan of the sculptures to Greece.