The 'Elgin' Marbles

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2023

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The permanent home of the Parthenon Marbles, also known as the 'Elgin' Marbles, has been the subject of a heated, decades-long debate. That debate was reignited this week when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak cancelled a meeting with the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis who had planned to raise the issue of returning the marbles to Greece in it.

Currently housed in the British Museum, Greece has been proactively campaigning for their return since the 1980s. But how did this controversy start, why did the marbles end up in London and why are they so important?

In this episode, Dan finds answers and solutions from Nick Malkoutzis and Georgia Nakou, two Greek journalists and contributors to the Macropolis.gr who provide the deep history of the marbles and how the two countries might resolve this dispute.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit to listen to all of our episodes ad free, get bonus content
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0:17.8	Hello everyone, welcome to this emergency episode of Down Snow's history hit.
0:26.7	Lord Byron, the poet, once wrote, Dull is the eye that will not weep to see, by walls deface, thy mouldering shrines removed,
0:37.2	by British hands which had best behove to guard those relics near to be restored.
0:43.0	Cursed be the hour from when their isle they roved.
0:47.0	And once again thy hapless bosom gourd,
0:50.0	and snatched thy shrinking gods to northern climes, abhorred.
0:57.5	He was talking about the removal of the so-called Elgin marbles, the frieze, the card figures that run right along the outside of the
1:07.2	pathanon on the Acropolis in Greece. They were removed by order of the British Ambassador to Constantinople, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman
1:18.3	Court, Lord Elgin, right at the beginning of the 19th century.
1:23.0	Greece, like much of Southeast Europe, was incorporated in to the Ottoman Empire.
1:29.0	And so they were the relevant legal authority at the time, and Lord Elgin always claimed in that evidence to show
1:34.8	that he had permission to take away the marbles, the Parthenon Fries.
1:40.6	However, the Turkish copy of that contract has been lost and it does remain a disputed fact.
1:48.0	In 2022, the Greek Culture Minister accused Elgin of a blatant act of serial theft. The from the Parthenon. They were transported to ships. One of those ships then sank. The
2:04.0	marbles were recovered and a subsea recovery operation. And then the British government
2:08.6	bought them from Lord Elgin in 1816 for display in the British Museum.
2:13.7	When Greece became independent in 1835, thanks in part to a crushing British and French naval
	...

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