By Korina Georgiou

The flagship museum of the British capital, a museum that claimed to be the custodian of hundreds of cultures is now in the midst of an unprecedented scandal. Lost objects and mysterious security gaps raise many questions about how protected the thousands of cultural heritage exhibits it houses are. The British Museum draws the world’s attention to yet another case of theft in its bosom.

The name of the main suspect in what the museum describes as its biggest security breach in a decade, Peter Higgs. This is the 56-year-old head of the department for the cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome, who is considered an expert on the Mediterranean peoples, especially Greece, holds a PhD in archeology and in 2021 was the curator of an exhibition that is now on tour outside the British Museum for the heroes and warriors of Ancient Greece. In fact, he was a member of a special team that locates stolen works of art and repatriates them and a particularly prominent face of the museum in the media.

But where might the precious relics be and will they ever be found? THE Christopher Marinello, lawyer and expert in the recovery of stolen antiquities and works of art speaks exclusively to SKAI about the much-lauded case.

“You know, this delay doesn’t help at all. If we have to recover items stolen from the museum, traditionally someone has to publish the list as quickly as possible and distribute it to art dealers, law enforcement agencies, including Interpol. It is very likely that these items have already been sold using various social media platforms and online auction houses. When items are sold on EBay they could be anywhere. We are even getting shocking reports that some of the stolen items may not have been recorded never in the museum’s catalogs, which could mean they were lost forever. It seems we’re not dealing with a gang, but just a disgruntled ex-employee who for some reason decided to sell priceless works art at a very low price compared to their real value,” he says characteristically.

According to the Daily Mail items worth £50,000 were being sold online for just £40. At the same time, the debate about the return of the Parthenon Marbles, this top monument of the world’s cultural heritage to their ancestral land, is rekindled, as the inexcusable security gaps as well as the inappropriate storage conditions of the exhibits are highlighted.

“For decades the authorities of the British Museum and the authorities of our country have presented many cheap excuses as to why the Marbles should not be returned to Greece, and that argument was that Greece cannot take care of its own property and that they could better preserved in the British Museum. But we do not want to hear any more from the British authorities that the British Museum is safe and the Acropolis Museum is not.”

“It weakens the British argument that we are better custodians of the Greek cultural heritage that we have in our hands. So this cannot apply and it cannot apply not only to this case, but it cannot apply to the thefts that they had done in the past,” says Irini Stamatoudi, Lawyer and Member of the Claims Committee of the Ministry of Culture, to SKAI. “At the moment we cannot know whether Greek antiquities have also been stolen or not because at the moment the British Museum has around 100,000 Greek antiquities in its possession and of those less than 6,500 are on display.”

One of the main arguments of the British is collapsing, and hopes for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles and the final resolution of this long-standing impasse are rekindled.