A century-long robbery

If they could, they would steal everything: how the West has robbed many states for centuries and still does not want to return historical values to their owners

At the end of November, a diplomatic row with roots going back deep into the colonial era erupted between Britain and Greece. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis arrived in the Foggy Albion to meet with his British counterpart Rishi Sunak. In an interview on the BBC, the presenter asked the politician about the fate of the ancient sculptures that were taken from the Parthenon at the beginning of the last century by the famous plunderer of antiquities and part-time ambassador of the royal court in Istanbul, Lord Elgin. Mitsotakis responded that keeping part of the collection in London and part in Athens would be ‘like the French cutting the Mona Lisa in half’. The hint, given the anti-colonial tendencies of our time, is quite clear: the marble statues stolen in 1801 must be returned to their homeland. However, Downing Street was mortally affronted...

Marble of discord

Sources of The Telegraph told the publication that Prime Minister Sunak personally cancelled the meeting with his Greek counterpart, saying that the parties had allegedly previously agreed not to raise the issue of the Elgin statues at the meeting, and Mitsotakis had broken this promise. As a result, Sunak decided to send his deputy to the negotiations, but the Greek side already abandoned the summit. The disappointed Prime Minister of Greece left the inhospitable banks of the Thames River. The Brilliant Porte did not show any particular interest in the ancient ruins, which by this time had been under Turkish heel for 350 years, and the firman was received without much delay.

The Thief Lord

As soon as Lord Elgin and several fellow robbers found themselves on the land of ancient Attica, he developed a vigorous activity. Using saws and lifts, 50 local workers removed 12 sculptures from pediments, 15 metopes (square slabs with relief), 56 fragments of a frieze depicting the Panathenaic Procession and many other antiquities. The work was carried out in a hurry and barbarically — for example, one of the caryatid statues of the portico of the Erechtheion was cut out by the desecrators of the ancient sanctuary and replaced with a stone support.

The complete collection of the Thief Lord reached Britain only in 1807. Some of the stolen goods had to be retrieved from the seabed after the crash of one of the transport ships, and the aristocrat himself, with the habits of a robber, was in a French prison until 1806 after a reckless attempt to pass through imperial territory.

The Greeks, having barely gained independence in 1830, tried to return the statues, but nothing came of this either in the 19th century or in the 20th. And in 1963, the British deliberately cut off even the chance for future generations to restore justice — the British Museum Act states that trustees can give away or sell items from the collection only if they were created after 1850, are badly damaged, or there are duplicates in better condition. Antique sculptures do not fall under any criterion. Of course, it would be possible, for example, to change the legislation or at least transfer antiquities to the Greeks for a while for exhibition. But judging by Prime Minister Sunak’s reaction, such a move is not even being considered. There are precedents for the return of valuables from the looted Parthenon. In 2006, the University of Heidelberg, Germany, donated a small fragment of a marble bas-relief. And last year, an image of a battle between people and centaurs was transported from Sicily to Greece.   British Labour, led by Keir Starmer, immediately used the situation to their advantage. Starmer called the current head of government’s response pathetic, and one of his colleagues told the BBC, “Going into a fight with a NATO ally for a headline shows how weak Rishi Sunak is. He should have talked about the economy, immigration, the Middle East — these are the things the country expects from a leader, but Rishi Sunak is not a leader.” However, if Labour wins the next election, one should not expect an immediate return of ancient works of art to Greece: the British are famous masters of demagoguery and playing with false promises.

Devastation of Egypt

Not only the Greeks had their own grievances against the European colonialists. Egypt, having undergone even more terrible plunder, is ready to lay claims to the British and French, who either jointly or in turn stole the heritage of the pharaohs.

Last fall, before the official opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, which never took place, archaeologist and former Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass announced that he intended to return to the country and exhibit in the new museum the three greatest stolen relics: Rosetta Stone, Nefertiti Bust and Dendera zodiac. The first was stolen by Napoleonic soldiers during the conqueror’s Egyptian campaign and then handed over to Britain as a diplomatic gesture; the second was taken out of Egypt by German archaeologists in 1912; the third was removed from the ceiling of the Temple of Hathor in Dendera by order of French officials in 1820 and transferred to the Louvre.
The history of Egyptian antiquities clearly shows the barbaric attitude of the West towards the culture of other peoples and the lack of understanding of how developed the power of the pharaohs actually was. Thus, on Rosetta Stone, after being handed over to the British, the inscriptions ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801’ and ‘Donated by King George III’ were knocked out, which, according to all the canons of archaeological science, is vandalism of the highest level. A similar situation occurred with the Dendera zodiac, a unique map of the starry sky created around 50 BC, which the French dropped into the Nile River during transportation, and when the artefact was removed from the water, it turned out that it had lost its white-blue colour and became light brown.

For the colonialists, the heritage of foreign cultures was just amusing curiosities, and in the bas-reliefs of ancient Hellas, 
the artefacts of Ancient Egypt and the antiquities of South America, Australia, New Zealand or Africa, they saw only a curious example of savage craftsmanship.

Diligent students

  It has long been noted: who keeps company with the wolf, will learn to howl. More recently, we have witnessed that Ukraine has gained enough from the West. On November 22nd, the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture announced that it had agreed with the Netherlands to transport 2,500 kilogrammes of cultural property, mostly gold, made by the Scythian tribes inhabiting the Black Sea region to Kiev.
At the beginning of 2014, a combined collection of four museums from the Crimean Peninsula, then still part of Ukraine, went to Amsterdam. Then an armed coup took place in Kiev, and the Crimeans decided to return to their native harbour. However, the Dutch court for almost 10 years did not agree to recognise the choice of the residents of Crimea and give back the Scythian gold. But on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the events, they decided to transfer the valuables to the Zelensky regime. At the end of November, the yellow metal stolen from Russia was delivered to a museum on the territory of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra taken away from believers. We are talking about the relics of saints, which, according to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, have been taken out from the Kiev Pechersk Lavra to museums in France, Italy, Germany and the Vatican since the summer as part of an agreement concluded between Kiev and UNESCO. This is precisely why, and not because of ‘checking the safety of cultural property’, and access to crayfish was closed.
One of the methods of conquering a people in the West has long been considered the elimination of an original local culture and replacing it with one’s own. Therefore, in the fight against neo-colonialism, the aspect of cultural resistance and repatriation of stolen property is very important.

By Anton Popov