Monday 13 November 2006

Acropolis marble returned

BBC:
A retired Swedish gym teacher is the toast of Greece after returning a piece of sculpted marble taken from the Acropolis more than a century ago.

Birgit Wiger-Angner's family held the marble for 110 years, but she decided to return it to Athens after hearing about Greece's Elgin marbles campaign.

The small fragment comes from the Acropolis's Erechtheion temple.

The move has boosted the international campaign to persuade the British Museum to return the Elgin marbles to Athens.

"I think that all people in the British Museum should also bring back all the originals. They can make copies belonging to themselves," she said.

But the British Museum is resisting growing international pressure to return the sculptures prised from the ancient Greek temple by Lord Elgin.

It insists that the sculptures were legally obtained from the authority governing Greece when Lord Elgin supposedly saved the sculpted tablets for Queen Victoria and a grateful nation.

It does not seem troubled by the fact that the nationality of that authority was Turkish, because until the mid-19th Century, Greece was occupied by the Ottoman empire.