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Greek PM 'annoyed' by Britain canceling meeting over Parthenon Sculptures spat

cnn.com

1–10 of 18 posts

Re: Greek PM 'annoyed' by Britain canceling meeting over Parthenon Sculptures spat

#5
Mitsotakis' plan for the sculptures is extremely self-serving and overall sucks for Greece. It effectively legitimizes the possesion of the Parthenon Sculptures by the British Museum, overturning decades of challenging the legality of the acquisition.

The TL;DR of the Museum's claim over the sculptures is that lord Elgin purchased them from the Ottomans, but somehow the purchase and removal permit documents were lost. That is a very shady claim. A modern day parallel would be puchasing Ukrainian heritage artifacts from Russia, and losing the transaction papers.

So, I'd say good for Greece! PM Sunak proved a great friend to the country.

Re: Greek PM 'annoyed' by Britain canceling meeting over Parthenon Sculptures spat

#6
"Sunak’s spokesman told reporters on Tuesday that the Greek government had “provided reassurances” that they would not use the visit to publicly raise the ownership of the Parthenon Sculptures and that since those assurances were broken, the meeting was canceled."

Seems a bit childish.

Re: Greek PM 'annoyed' by Britain canceling meeting over Parthenon Sculptures spat

#9

"Sunak’s spokesman told reporters on Tuesday that the Greek government had “provided reassurances” that they would not use the visit to publicly raise the ownership of the Parthenon Sculptures and that since those assurances were broken, the meeting was canceled." Seems a bit childish.

It's all for PR, Sunak wants to public to think he's strong and standing up for British interest on the world stage.

He's not very good at it.

Re: Greek PM 'annoyed' by Britain canceling meeting over Parthenon Sculptures spat

#10
A contrarian take:

The Acropolis Museum gets 1.4 million visitors a year and a ticket costs $10 to $20 depending on season. The British Museum is free and gets 4 million visitors per year.

Thus if the aim of any museum is to provide access to the most and widest range of people, rich or poor, the sculptures are seen and appreciated by many many more people and for free if they remain in Britain than if they were taken back to where they were removed.

A counter-contrarian and tech optimist take would be that digital museums technology, high-res photos, VR, video etc would vastly increase the outreach of any object in any museum anywhere in the world. So the actual objects could never see the light of day again, be replaced by high quality reproductions and still more people will see it. One might even say it doesn't matter where they are or if a museum has it, if its properly served by the internet!

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