Between 1801 and 1812, workmen on the Acropolis of Athens — then a garrisoned Ottoman fortress — prised, lowered and in places sawed away roughly half of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon, on the orders of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Some 75 metres of the temple's 160-metre frieze, 15 of its 92 carved metope panels and 17 pediment figures were crated for Britain. Two centuries later, those crates' contents constitute the most disputed objects in any museum on Earth — even the name is contested, "Elgin Marbles" versus "Parthenon Sculptures", each label quietly taking a side.
The temple Elgin's men dismantled was already a ruin, and not an ancient one. The Parthenon, completed in 432 BC under Pericles with sculpture directed by Phidias, had survived remarkably intact as a temple, then a church, then a mosque — until 1687, when a Venetian mortar round hit the gunpowder magazine the Ottomans had installed inside, blowing out the building's heart. For a century afterwards, fallen marble was burned for lime or carried off by souvenir hunters. Elgin, arriving as ambassador in 1799, initially wanted only drawings and plaster casts for the improvement of British taste; ambition grew, and in 1801 he obtained from the Ottoman authorities a firman, or official letter, whose terms have been argued over ever since. The original document is lost; what survives is an Italian translation, which permits drawing, digging and the taking away of "some pieces of stone with old inscriptions and figures". Whether that phrase licensed stripping the building itself — and how far the gifts and payments Elgin's agents made to local officials shaped what was tolerated — is the heart of the legal dispute to this day.
Ruinous acquisition
The marbles nearly failed to arrive at all: Elgin's brig Mentor sank off the island of Kythera in 1802 with a cargo of frieze blocks, which divers salvaged over two years. Elgin himself, travelling home, was detained in France for three years as a prisoner of the Napoleonic Wars, and the venture — which cost him around £70,000 — helped ruin him. Lord Byron, then the most famous poet alive, savaged the removals in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and The Curse of Minerva, fixing the charge of plunder in verse for every generation since. Nor was the Parthenon the only victim: Elgin's haul also included one of the six caryatids — the sculpted maidens holding up the porch of the neighbouring Erechtheion — whose five sisters remain in Athens with a cast in her place. In 1816 a parliamentary Select Committee examined the affair, pronounced the acquisition legitimate, and bought the collection for the nation at £35,000 — half what Elgin had spent. The marbles entered the British Museum in 1817 and have been on display ever since, since 1939 in a gallery paid for by the art dealer Lord Duveen. Duveen's name attaches to the collection's darkest custodial episode: in 1937–38 masons in his pay scraped the sculptures with copper tools and abrasives to make them fashionably white, stripping ancient surface detail; the museum halted the work, but the full extent of the damage was only candidly aired decades later.
Two galleries, one temple
Greece, independent since 1832, has sought the sculptures' return ever since — formally and insistently from 1983, when the actress-turned-culture-minister Melina Mercouri electrified the campaign. The British Museum's position rests on the 1816 purchase, on the British Museum Act 1963, which forbids the trustees from disposing of the collection, and on the argument that in London the marbles tell a world story alongside Egypt, Assyria and Rome. Athens' answer was built in 2009: Bernard Tschumi's Acropolis Museum, whose top floor is a glass gallery aligned exactly with the Parthenon visible outside, displaying every surviving element in its original arrangement — with stark white plaster casts holding the seats of everything that is in London. Other fragments sit in the Louvre, Vienna, Copenhagen and Würzburg, and in 2023 the Vatican sent its three pieces back to Athens as a papal "donation". Talks between London and Athens over some form of loan or partnership have surfaced repeatedly without resolution. The two halves of Phidias's frieze, carved as a single procession, still march towards each other from 1,500 miles apart.
Quiz nuggets
- The sculptures were removed from the Parthenon in 1801–12 for the Earl of Elgin, ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and bought by Parliament in 1816 for £35,000.
- Elgin's 1801 firman survives only as an Italian translation permitting removal of "some pieces of stone".
- The Parthenon was wrecked in 1687 when a Venetian shell detonated an Ottoman gunpowder store inside it.
- London holds about 75m of the 160m frieze; an unauthorised 1937–38 "cleaning" with copper tools damaged the surfaces.
- The Acropolis Museum (2009) displays the Athens half aligned with the Parthenon, with plaster casts marking the pieces held in London.