Spectator: The Sculptures belong to us, slaves built the Parthenon, Neo-Greeks are not descendants of Pericles

A columnist of the Spectator magazine proceeded in a highly provocative text, regarding the Parthenon Sculptures.

In a delusional text, the historian Zarir Masani mentions that Britain legally took the Sculptures and “saved them from destruction”, stressing that they do not belong to Greece, but “to the British Museum”. In fact, in the publication it is written that the Parthenon “was built mainly by slaves”.

The columnist opposes the idea of ​​even lending the marbles to Greece, beginning his article with the title: “The Elginian Marbles and the decay of decolonization”.

He comments that the Parthenon Sculptures were “legally transferred” by Lord Elgin in 1802, since the Parthenon was “a neglected ruin of the Ottoman Empire”, while he comments that there is no evidence that modern Greeks are descended from the ancient Athenians.

“Slaves built the Parthenon”

“The legality of Greek claims to the Marmaras is dubious at best. The Parthenon frieze, built mainly by slaves in 500 BC, was allegedly “stolen” by Elgin in 1802 while he was the British ambassador in Constantinople. The Parthenon at that time was a neglected ruin in the Ottoman Empire, the then internationally recognized ruler of present-day Greece. The Parthenon had been used as an ammunition depot and had been severely damaged by explosions,” Masani writes in his article.

“When Elgin arrived, the site was being cannibalized by Turks who sold pieces of it as souvenirs to tourists,” he adds, noting that “there is no indication that the population of modern Greece is entitled after two and a half millennia to claim descent from either the slaves who built the Parthenon or by the Athenian rulers who commissioned its construction. Populations have migrated, mixed, and mutated throughout the world for millennia, so few of us can claim rights based on geographic or ethnic continuity from antiquity.”

Masani insists on his claim that the Sculptures “were transported quite legally from Elgin, with official permission from the Ottoman government to London, at a personal cost of £5 million” and adds that they were sold, “again quite legally, to the British Government, which she in turn donated them to the British Museum.”

“The new Greek state, which was created with British help, had a demand for the marbles half a century later” he comments characteristically, deifying Lord Elgin who “saved them from obscurity and destruction”.

“Greece is brainwashing, it will never return the Sculptures”

In the same pattern, Massani speaks of “brainwashing Greece which will be responsible for the eventual return, under the guise of a loan, of some of the most emblematic objects of the British Museum, the Parthenon Marbles”.

The historian claims, in fact, that if the loan proceeds, then the Marbles will not be returned to the British Museum.

“There is no doubt that the Greek government, which still claims legal ownership, will never willingly repay such a loan, and we all know that possession represents nine-tenths of the legal status,” he says, and concludes with the view that “the Sculptures of the Parthenon belong to the British Museum, where they are admired by more than 6 million visitors a year, and not to the Acropolis Museum, where less than a third of the above visitors come every year.”