In the 60s and 70s all our secondary schools followed the same history curriculum. We began with Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain and made our way systematically through England’s vicissitudes from 55 BC up to 1914, skimming the extreme edges of classical antiquity and contemporary history. The former was held to be the remit of the classics department, and of the latter we did not speak. My history teacher justified this on the basis that objectivity was impossible without a certain distance; my youthful cynicism judged it more likely a reluctance to engage with criticism of the status quo.
In those final history lessons in the fifth form, as we edged towards the First World War, I developed a wild enthusiasm for Gavrilo Princip. This can certainly not have been the intention of my history teacher, a firm supporter of law and order, who would without doubt have been an apologist for the Austro-Hungarian Empire against the upstart Serb from Bosnia.
But to me Princip was a romantic hero, striking a blow against Austria’s occupation of Bosnian territory in 1878 followed by its aggressive annexation in 1908. Young Bosnia was a revolutionary movement seeking to end Austro-Hungarian rule over Bosnia-Herzegovina and to establish an independent state. The political assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the representative and heir of an unelected ruler at home and a foreign oppressor in Bosnia, was entirely justified. Princip was a freedom fighter.
If there had been posters of Princip for sale in English provincial towns in 1968, one would undoubtedly have adorned my bedroom wall alongside Che Guevara.
Two years ago, I visited a museum with the cumbersome designation Museum of Sarajevo,1878-1918. The dates mark the period of Austro-Hungary’s occupation, and it was from outside this building that Princip fired the shots which killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Until the collapse of Yugoslavia it had been called the Young Bosnia Museum, and Princip and his fellow members of Young Bosnia had been glorified as revolutionary idealists. Outside the museum a footprint was set into the cement to mark the spot where Princip stood to take aim at the Archduke, and there visiting Yugoslav schoolchildren used to pose for photographs.
The Museum of Sarajevo 1878-1918, located in a former delicatessen beside the Latin Bridge, formerly called the Princip Bridge.
Today a discreet sign set into the pavement marks the place where Princip stood. Formerly Yugoslavian children would pose for photographs standing in Princip’s footsteps
Today, the museum’s approach is more subdued. It records the history of resistance to Austro-Hungarian oppression, and the assassination. There are clothes, photographs, and weapons on display, and two uncomfortable looking waxworks of the archduke and his wife. But the tone is factual, and the historic significance of the museum’s location is not stressed.
For the recent history of the former Yugoslavia has cast a shadow which has led to the past being rewritten in some of the former constituent republics. Under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic ethnic cleansing of Croats took palace in those parts of Croatia controlled by Serbia. Milosevic’s ultra nationalism, his irredentist and revanchist attempt to seize Bosnia for the Serbs, combined with Radovan Karadzic’s genocidal massacre at Srebrenica, and the brutal siege of Sarajevo, have cast the Serbs in an ugly light.
And Princip has become a polarising figure: while still a hero in Serbia, he is now perceived in Croatia as a Serbian nationalist terrorist rather than a liberty loving revolutionary. He is even held responsible for the First World War rather than his actions being understood as a catalyst and excuse for further Austrian aggression.
There is no commonly held view in Bosnia. Two different versions of the truth are expounded alongside each other. School texts in predominantly Bosniak and Croat areas describe Princip as a Belgrade backed terrorist, while the children of Bosnian Serbs are taught that his cause was a just one, seeking liberation from colonised serfdom.
It is unwise to rewrite the past in the light of the present. It is true that in 1914 there was in Serbia a desire for a union of southern Slavs under Serbian hegemony, and that the Bosniaks and Croats had no desire for this greater Serbia. But Princip was no Milosevic or Karadzic, his loathing for Austrian oppression was legitimate. At his trial he argued,
I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free of Austria.
Asked why he had shot the archduke he replied,
People suffer because they are so poor and because they are treated as animals. I am the son of a peasant; I know how people live in the villages and that is why I wanted revenge.
Princip risked his life for a revolutionary ideology of social justice. Austrian rule was feudal and oppressive, political opposition brutally suppressed. Moreover, the Serbian government was not involved in the assassination, and the members of Young Bosnia were drawn from all three ethnic groups in Bosnia: the Bosniaks, the Bosnian Serbs, and the Croats.
The museum, located in predominantly Bosniak Sarajevo, displays understandable discretion. But I was happy to see that Princip’s grave in the Holy Archangels Cemetery in Sarajevo still receives care. At the time of the assassination, Princip was only nineteen, a year too young to be subjected to the death penalty, so he was given the maximum sentence of twenty years in an Austrian military prison. There, chained to a wall in solitary confinement, he died of TB in 1918. In 1920 he and his comrades were exhumed and reburied below the Vidovdan Heroes Chapel. Today there are flowers on the grave, and it bears a quotation from the Montenegrin poet, Petrovic-Njegos,
Blessed is he who lives forever; he did not die in vain.
Grave of Gavrilo Princip and his Young Bosnia comrades
Vidovdan Heroes Chapel, Holy Archangel Cemetery, Sarajevo
Gavrilo Princip, photograph in museum of Sarajevo 1878-1918
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Britain has not been invaded since 1066, when, as alleged by Sellar and Yeatman, “The Norman Conquest was a Good Thing, as from this time onwards England stopped being conquered and thus was able to become top nation.”
Acknowledged, but not entirely true, for though their achievements were usually puny by contrast with the Normans, and though they are not so well remembered, other assailants have landed from time to time, seeking to vanquish and subjugate the land.
Under Sweyn II the Danes took first York in 1069, and then Ely in 1070, before accepting a bribe to leave the country.
The future Louis VIII of France had himself proclaimed king, though never crowned, in London in 1216. He captured Winchester and controlled half of England before being defeated at Lincoln and accepting 10,000 marks to withdraw.
In 1588, when the apparently much greater threat of the Spanish Armada was defeated by a combination of English fireships and British weather, some unfortunate Spaniards landed by default, shipwrecked on the west coasts of Scotland and Ireland. Later, at the Battle of Cornwall in 1595 a Spanish force of four hundred men sacked Mousehole, Penzance, Newlyn, and Paul.
When the Dutch sailed up the Medway to Chatham in 1667, they burned more than a dozen warships and captured the flagship of the English fleet, HMS Royal Charles. Samuel Pepys recorded his alarm:
and so home, where all our hearts do now ake; for the newes is true, that the Dutch have broke the chaine and burned our ships, and particularly The Royal Charles, other particulars I know not, but most sad to be sure. And, the truth is, I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone, … So having with much ado finished my business at the office, I home to consider with my father and wife of things, and then to supper and to bed with a heavy heart.
Twenty-one years later another Dutch invasion, led by William of Orange, landed in Devon, with a fleet of 463 ships and 40,000 men. This time they had been invited by the opponents of James II, and when the latter fled the country, he was deemed to have abdicated. William and Mary replaced him, a substitution legitimised by Parliament and hailed as The Glorious Revolution.
But while that may have been the last successful incursion into mainland Britain, it was not the final landing by a hostile force. On 24 February 1797 around 1,200 French soldiers landed at Carreg Wastad Point near Fishguard in South Wales. This battalion incorporated a penal unit consisting of convicts mobilised for military service. Called the Legion Noire, because they used captured British uniforms died black or blue, they landed appropriately under cover of darkness.
The defending forces were ill-prepared and outnumbered: a quickly assembled group of five hundred reservist militia, aided by the civilian population. Yet the Battle of Fishguard, little more a few skirmishes, was over in two days with the French troops making an unconditional surrender.
Once they had landed discipline had broken down amongst the French troops as they ransacked local farms, looted, and grew intoxicated. Was this why they were so easily defeated? No, it was all down to Jemima.
Jemima Nicholas was a cobbler in Fishguard who led a group of women, armed only with pitchforks, against the French. One story describes Jemima single-handedly rounding up twelve French soldiers and holding them captive overnight in a church at Strumble Head. Another has the Welsh women in their traditional red cloaks and steep crowned black hats marching up and down the cliffs until nightfall, and the inebriated soldiers mistaking them for British Redcoats and thinking themselves outnumbered. Instantly demoralised, they capitulated.
Whatever the finer details, the government concurred that Jemima had taken a brave stand against the French. She was awarded an annual pension of five pounds for helping to defeat the invasion.
Subsequently known as Jemima Fawr, Jemima the Great, Fishguard’s heroine was buried in the churchyard of St. Mary. There was no headstone at the time, but in 1897 a stone was erected by public subscription collected at a centenary banquet. It records rather quaintly that,
She died in the main street July 1832,
Aged 82 years.
At the date of the invasion she
Was 47 years old, and
Lived 35 years after the event.
Jemima’s grave, outside St. Mary’s, Fishguard
A sign above the Royal Oak pub in Fishguard records that the peace treaty was signed there, following the last invasion of Britain.
My friends were reluctant to linger in the graveyard, but were eager to celebrate the signing of the peace treaty where it took place – at the Royal Oak pub in Fishguard
In 1997, at the bicentenary, seventy-seven local people embroidered the LastInvasion Tapestry employing the same techniques as those used for the Bayeaux Tapestry.
A pastoral scene before the French soldiers arrive.
French ships are sighted…
…and word spreads that they are coming closer.
The French land at Carreg Gwasted…
…the Red Coats will be outnumbered.
The Battle of Fishguard begins…
… alarm ensues…
… and some townsfolk flee.
But Jemima, equipped with only a pitchfork, is more than a match for the French soldiers…
…she captures twelve of them…
…they will rue the day they invaded Fishguard.
Jemima and the other Welsh women in their red cloaks and black hats march up and down until nightfall…
… the inebriated French soldiers mistake them for Redcoats, lay down their arms…
…and prepare to march to prison. The French are defeated. Hurrah for Jemima!
You can find the tapestry of the Last Invasion in the Fishguard library. And if you want to contrast it with the Bayeaux Tapestry of the Norman Invasion, there is no need to go to Bayeaux. Reading Museum has a perfect copy of the latter and no jostling crowds.
You can almost hear the cicadas. With the vivid cerulean sky and the intense light, the pines and cypresses, there can be no doubt where this grave lies. Here, close to the entrance, in the most prestigious section of The First Cemetery of Athens, lie the wealthier and more known of her citizens. The grave stele by the sculptor Andreas Panagiotakis rises above the tomb of the Merkouris family, prominent politicians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; one name stands out, for her fame eclipses that of her ancestors.
Grave of Melina Mercouri, Athens First Cemetery
The faux Doric Temple behind and above the tomb of the Mekouris family is that of Schliemann (another story)
When the impossibly glamorous, smoky-voiced, Melina Mercouri died in 1994, theatres and cinemas closed. On the day of her state funeral, schools, shops, and government offices followed their example as the cortege, with 300,000 people walking behind, made its way to the cemetery.
After working in Greek theatre in the 1940s and 1950s, Mercouri had established her role in Greek cinema with Stella (1955), a retelling of the Carmen story, but it was with Never on Sunday (1960), written and directed by Jules Dassin, that she sprang to international fame. The story of Ilya, a prostitute in Piraeus, and Homer-Thrace, an American tourist and classical scholar, part romantic comedy, part asseveration of a joyful, carefree epicureanism contrasted with stagnant, patriarchal conformity, won Mercouri best actress at the Cannes Film Festival. Its theme tune by Manos Hadjidakis introduced western audiences to the bouzouki. Never on Sunday is even credited with stimulating the Greek tourist boom of the 1960s.
Mercouri went on to make films in Greece, America, and France, including Phaedra and Topkapi, before returning to a stage career on Broadway and in Greece.
Then in 1967 a right-wing military coup brought the regime of the colonels to power in Greece. For seven years, first under Papadopoulos, then under Ioannidis, the Greek Junta attacked civil liberties, ending freedom of the press, dissolving political parties, prohibiting political demonstrations, producing an index of prohibited songs, music, literature, and films. Ultra nationalistic and deeply anti-Communist, they imprisoned, tortured, and exiled their opponents. Politicised by the coup, Mercouri, who had been working in America, spent those years travelling around the world raising awareness of Greek politics and campaigning for the removal of the junta. The colonels responded by revoking her Greek citizenship and confiscating her property. Her response was succinct:
I was born a Greek, and I will die a Greek. Those bastards were born fascists, and they will die fascists.
Returning to Greece after the fall of the junta, she was a founding member of PASOK, the centre-left, Panhellenic Socialist Movement, which she represented in the Hellenic Parliament from 1977-1994. During the PASOK government of 1981-85 she became the first female Minister for Culture and Sports, and in this capacity introduced the European Capitals of Culture scheme, with Athens the first city so designated in 1985. The scheme raised the image and visibility of the cities involved, celebrating the richness and diversity of European cultures, and in its wake bringing not just cultural and social benefits, but economic benefits too with increased tourism and urban regeneration.
But there are other actors, other activists, other politicians, and Mercouri is most remembered for her battle for the return of the Elgin marbles to Greece.
Between 1801 and 1812 agents acting for Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, then Ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Athens, removed more than half of the surviving Parthenon sculptures, and others from the Erechtheion, the Temple of Athena Nike, and the Propylaea. Elgin took possession of twenty-one statues, fifteen metope panels, and seventy-five metres of Parthenon frieze. To facilitate their carriage from Ottoman Greece to his private museum in Britain, the metopes and frieze were sawn and sliced. Byron, in no doubt that this was an act of vandalism and looting, wrote in Child Harold’s Pilgrimage:
Dull is the eye that will not weep to see Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed By British hands, which it had best behoved To guard those relics ne’er to be restored. Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved, And once again thy hapless bosom gored, And snatch’d thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!
The poet was not alone in his outrage, but in Britain in 1816 a Parliamentary Enquiry ruled that the sculptures had been acquired legally, authorised by a firman from the Ottoman government; the questionable right of an occupying power to exercise such jurisdiction was conveniently ignored. Elgin was able to sell his glypotheque to the British government and the sculptures passed to the trusteeship of the British Museum.
Following requests for their return to an independent Greece in 1836, 1846, 1890 and 1927 by ministers and representatives of the city of Athens, academics and lawyers returned to the exhaustive discussion of the legality of their removal from Greece, and the arguments roll on in the tradition of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, where questions of right and wrong are lost in a minefield of legalistic niceties.
Meanwhile the main defence for Elgin’s action focused more on the claim that the marbles had never been cared for prior to his arrival: as early as the sixth century CE the Temple of Athena Parthenos had been turned into a church and its metopes defaced by Christians eager to remove images of pagan deities. Under the Turks there was similar debasement when it was used first as a mosque, then as a gunpowder store. In 1687 Venetian artillery ignited the gunpowder leading to an explosion and extensive damage, and portions of fallen marble were removed for use as building material. Moreover, weathering and pollution took their toll, so that the marbles in the British museum were soon in a better condition than those which had been left behind, notwithstanding the damage caused by early cleaning methods using acid, oil, lard, scrapers, and silicon carbide – all accepted techniques of their time.
For Melina Mercouri however these arguments were secondary to cultural considerations. As Minister for Culture, she began an international campaign in 1981, formally requesting the return of the sculptures and listing the dispute with UNESCO. In 1983 she took part in a televised debate with David Wilson, then director of the British museum, which was a PR disaster for the latter. The cultural importance of the sculptures for Greece became more widely understood, as did the morally dubious nature of any legal arguments for their retention. At the Oxford Union, in 1986, Mercouri argued passionately that the Marbles were more to Greece than just works of art: that they were an essential element of Greek heritage, which tied directly into cultural identity:
You must understand what the Parthenon Marbles mean to us. They are our pride. They are our sacrifices. They are our noblest symbol of excellence. They are a tribute to the democratic philosophy. They are our aspirations and our name. They are the essence of Greekness.
In government again in 1989, she initiated an international architectural competition for the design of a new Acropolis museum to display all the artefacts from the Acropolis excavation and to provide a suitable designated space for the Elgin marbles, thus invalidating the popular justification for their retention in the British Museum, and reasoning that not only would there be a worthy place for them but that they would be better appreciated in a unified display with the other Parthenon antiquities.
Work on the new museum began in the 1990s but was halted due to the discovery of sensitive archaeological finds, and the competition results annulled. Meanwhile Mercouri died in 1994. But in 2001 a new competition was announced, won by the new York architect Bernard Tschumi in collaboration with the Greek Michael Photiadis. Construction began in 2003 and was completed in 2009. Built in glass, steel, and reinforced concrete, the new Acropolis Museum stands opposite the Theatre of Dionysus, from its top floor there are panoramic views of the Acropolis. The exhibits behind the huge glass windows are integral with the landscape. The whole space is flooded with that intense Greek light. The surviving sculptures are arranged as they originally stood on the Parthenon, the frieze in its original orientation and within sight of the Parthenon.
Welcoming people at the opening ceremony of the new museum Antonis Samaras, the then Greek Minister of Culture, reminded them:
(It is) 188 years since the declaration of the Greek Independence… and 27 years since the campaign of Melina Mercouri, a duty is fulfilled, and a dream is realized!
But the dream is only half realised, for plaster copies represent the sculptures still retained in the British Museum. In 2021 UNESCO declared that the British government had an obligation to return them.
The British Museum is free to everyone, the Acropolis Museum is not; while 1.5 million people visit the Acropolis every year, six million visit the British Museum; in the British museum the sculptures can be viewed within the context of other major ancient cultures, and there is a fear that the return of the marbles would set a precedent undermining the collections of all museums of world culture. Nonetheless, public opinion has swung increasingly in favour of the return of the sculptures. Resistance by the British government and the British Museum has begun to sound a little desperate as Parliament argues that the decision is the responsibility of the trustees of the British Museum, while the latter claim that their hands are tied by the British Museum Act of 1963 which forbids them to dispose of their holdings, and only Parliament itself can amend the Act.
I am wary of Mercouri’s seductive hyperbole, and I do not believe that the sculptures belong to the Greeks, any more than they ever belonged to the British, the Turks or any other national group. But I do believe that they belong in Greece. Surely no one who has visited the Acropolis Museum and the Duveen Gallery where the Elgin marbles are housed in the British Museum can doubt this.
I have never been able to enter the Duveen Gallery without experiencing a dispiriting chill. It is, to be frank, a depressing space. A skylight runs the length of the gallery, but it is a weak, grey light which filters through; the solid masonry of the walls is oppressive; the sculptures are prisoners in this environment with all the drab, listless, lethargy of the forcibly incarcerated.
The Duveen Gallery, British Museum.
Artificial light is needed to supplement the weak, grey, natural light.
Centaur and lapith, south metope…
frieze block…
sculpture from the east pediment… all trapped in a bleak place.
Part of the East Pediment, imprisoned in gloomy surroundings.
Contrast this sterile, soulless environment with the light filled Acropolis museum. The building’s glass facades facilitate a visual connection with the Acropolis, to which it is linked via the pedestrianised street of Dionysios Areopagitou. On the top floor the rectangular hall of the Parthenon gallery mirrors the form and proportions of the original temple. Oriented directly towards the Acropolis, skylit, glass enclosed, drenched in the ambient natural light, it is irrefutably the most fitting locale for sculptures intended for the sun suffused Acropolis.
(My photographs of the Acrpolis Museum do not do it justice, so have a look at https://www.archdaily.com >Projects>categories>cultural architecture>museums>Greece)
It is time to realise Mercouri’s dream and send the Parthenon sculptures home.
If you ask me will I be alive when they come back, Yes, I will be alive. And if I’m not alive, I will be reborn.
