President of the British Museum: ‘Greece and Britain could share the Parthenon Sculptures’

The president of the British Museum in London has said he is open to an agreement with Athens to allow the two sides to share the Parthenon marbles, which are at the center of a long-running dispute between the United Kingdom and Greece.

“I believe that an agreement is possible to tell their story in both Athens and London, if we approach this situation unconditionally or with too many red lines,” George Osborne told LBC Radio on Tuesday night.

Asked if an agreement could be reached to have the marbles on display in Greece for a while and then return to London, the British Museum president said “this type of arrangement” would be possible, “something that will allow us to see with all their grandeur in Athens and to see them together with examples of other cultures in London “.

The French agency notes that British public opinion is increasingly in favor of the repatriation of the marbles: 59% of respondents believe that the marbles, which were extracted in 1802 from the Parthenon by the British diplomat Lord Elgin, belong to Greece, according to the latest survey by the English institute Yougov, compared to 37% in 2014.

The prestigious British newspaper The Times, which has always been a staunch supporter of the British Museum, advocated the return of the marbles in January.

According to Agence France-Presse, pressure is generally mounting on European cultural institutions to return items that were looted during the colonial era.

Last year, for the first time in the United Kingdom, the University of Cambridge officially returned to Nigeria a bronze statuette of a rooster that had been looted a century ago.

The British Museum is currently refusing to follow this path.