I don't know about you, but I think my favorite archaeological objects are the ones that come

with a curse. I keep finding myself drawn to tales of evil artifacts that bring doom upon anyone foolish enough to try and possess them.

On this podcast, we've dug into stories about the sarcophagus that allegedly sank the Titanic,

the curse of King Tut's tomb, and the world-conquering spear of destiny.

The Parthenon marbles may not be as haunted as some of those other objects.

But there have been rumors that the sculptures taken from Athens Acropolis by Lord Elgin carry a curse.

You see, not long after Lord Elgin had his team of workmen hack the best-preserved ancient

sculptures from the Parthenon, his life became roiled by a series of escalating calamities.

As the American journalist Carl Meyer once succinctly put it, Elgin's time as the ambassador

to Constantinople ultimately led to him losing his quote, fortune, his reputation, his wife, and the lower half of his

nose, end quote. For the more superstitious, Elgin's fate did not seem like a series of

unfortunate coincidences. For some, this seemed like divine justice measured out by Athena herself.

Even before Lord Elgin left to take his post in Constantinople, he had already accrued some

fairly substantial debts. Much of the borrowed money had been used to renovate his

estate, known as Broom Hall. But at the time, this did not seem too worrisome, as Lord Elgin had

just managed to secure the hand of Mary Nisbet in marriage. Nisbet was an heiress from one of the wealthiest families in Scotland.

Once married, Lord and Lady Elgin seemed quite financially stable. This was until Lord Elgin

started bankrolling his expensive operation in Athens.

The original plan to sketch and make plaster casts on the Acropolis

quickly ballooned into the ambitious and costly project of removing,

then shipping, thousands of pounds of marble.

What was worse, one of the first ships loaded with sculptures from the Parthenon

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