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.
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 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.
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.
Melina Mercouri, 1988
