FT: The background to the secret Mitsotakis-Osborne meeting that could seal the fate of the Parthenon Sculptures

An extensive review of the meeting the Prime Minister had Kyriakos Mitsotakis with the president of the British Museum, George Osborneat the Berkeley Hotel in London in November 2021 on the subject of the return of the Parthenon Sculptures to Greece, the Financial Times presents the history of the case and the arguments of both sides.

Osborne, recently appointed chairman of the world’s oldest public museum, the British Museum, saw an opportunity to show he runs an enlightened institution ready to join the debate on art repatriation, the FT reports.

Osborne also saw, the report continues, a man across the table with whom he could work.

The article continues:

“There are few things about which Kyriakos Mitsotakis speaks with passion. After 3.5 years at the helm of his country, he is known for his efficiency, organizational skills and pro-business reforms […] Osborne barely knew Mitsotakis before they met. But the two made it. Mitsotakis told colleagues afterwards that there was ‘trust and respect’, while Osborne saw the Greek prime minister as an effective technocrat, even joking to colleagues that Mitsotakis, an Anglophile, was ‘Greece’s Rishi Sounak’.

Osborne has refused to speak publicly about his talks with Mitsotakis, fearing that anything he says could be used against the prime minister, who faces an election in the coming months.

But colleagues said he immediately believed there could be a deal.

‘Essentially, you had two sane people in a room with no weights or backstory,’ said a source at the British Museum. ‘You could come to an agreement where some of the Sculptures at any given time would be in London and some of them in Athens.’

The proposal may sound reasonable, but Greece believes that the Sculptures were stolen by Elgin, belong to the Greek people and should be returned immediately to the wonderful new Acropolis Museum in Athens. Osborne, meanwhile, is constrained by the 1963 Act of Parliament, which prohibits the British Museum from permanently returning the Parthenon Sculptures.

The British government is not going to change the law, despite calls to do so by a Unesco commission in 2021. Failure to find a deal is a very real possibility.

Osborne’s proposal uses a number of strategies to bridge the gap between the sides, including swapping. According to people briefed on the plan, it would involve a series of loan agreements involving the Sculptures that would gradually build trust.

Greece would not renounce its claim – it would be a big problem for Mitsotakis to accept a ‘loan’ of what is considered Greek property – but the British Museum would agree to send to Athens a third or more of the Sculptures for a specified period , like 10 years.

There is even a precedent. One of the Sculptures – the demigod Ilyssos – was loaned to Vladimir Putin, to be displayed in the museum Hermitage of Saint Petersburg in 2014.

An obvious problem is whether the Greeks would return them at the end of the period. Richard Lambert, Osborne’s predecessor at the British Museum and a former editor of the FT, says: ‘I assumed that if they borrowed, they wouldn’t return.’

A British Museum source admits: ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law when it comes to fairly large marble sculptures.’

The Osborne plan involved that in exchange for some of the Parthenon Sculptures, Athens would lend Greek treasures to London as ‘compensation’. The impressive frescoes of Santorini, dating from 1700 BC, have been mentioned in Athens as among the possible candidates for such an exchange.

The second element of the Osborne plan would be that, when the loan expired, the Sculptures would return to London, but a larger portion would simultaneously go to Athens as an incentive, making Greece a permanent home for the Sculptures at all times. .

Officials at the British Museum envision a situation where half of the Parthenon Sculptures could be in London and the other half in Athens at any given time.

Talks are also underway on a legal agreement, which would provide that a Greek agreement with the British Museum would not force Athens to accept in principle the ownership status of the Sculptures.”

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