[image description: two pictures, one above the other. The first image shows a statue originally from the Acropolis in Athens, now in the British Museum. The statue is a column shaped like a woman. It is labelled London. The bottom image is from the Acropolis Museum in Athens, showing the other five matching column/statues, with a space for the missing statue pointedly left open. This picture is shot from above and is labelled Athens.
image in savvysergeantâs reblog: screencap of tags from two people. Feeblekazooâs tags read: the degree to which the Acropolis museum is designed to shame the British Museum is spectactular. butherlipsarenotmovingâs tags read: the acropolis museum is the most passive aggressive museum iâve ever been to and i love it
For those of you who donât know museum drama, one of the largest and most famous parts of the British Museumâs collection is the so-called Elgin Marbles, which were looted from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin in the 18th Century. (The Acropolis is the hill in Athens, Greece which has some of the most amazing Greek ruins anywhere, the most famous of which is the Parthenon.) Elgin had (or at least claims to have had) permission from the Ottoman Empire to take stuff home with him, but a) this is one empire asking another empire if they can loot stuff from the other empireâs subjugated people, so, not exactly any moral high ground there Elgin, and b) he took a lot more stuff than the Ottomans said he could have.
Greece has been asking for those statues and sculptures to be returned since they won independence in 1832. Thatâs right, 1832, 190 years ago. The British Museum has had a number of excuses over the years, one of the biggies of the late 20th Century being âwe couldnât possibly give them back because Athens doesnât have a nice enough museum to display themâ and ignoring Greeceâs response of âwe will BUILD a museum just for them if you will just give us our damn stuff back!â
Finally, Greece said âfuck youâ and built a museum at the bottom of the Acropolis called the Acropolis museum. It is huge, it is gorgeous, the collection of objects is amazing and the educational bits (âthis is what it is and why it mattersâ) are really well done. Itâs probably one of the best archaeological museums in the world; it definitely is the best collection of ancient Greek artifacts in the world, both for the size of the collection and the way itâs displayed.
Oh. And it is amazingly passive-aggressive. Every single piece of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum has an empty spot on display waiting for the piece to be returned to Greece. For example, there are a lot of pieces where Elgin took, say, the nicest (or easiest to remove) one of a set. The column/statue in the OPâs image is one of these. Friezes from the roof of the Parthenon are another example. The Acropolis Museum displays each one of these sets with space for the stolen pieces, along with a picture of what the stolen piece looks like and where it is. It is a giant middle finger at the British Museum, disguised as helpful information.
Thereâs no chance that the British Museum will return any of this in the next generation. Itâs not up to the curators at the British Museum; they donât get any say in this. The board of governors of the British Museum is made up of old posh English people who genuinely believe that the Empire was awesome and England has a perfect right to everything in the British Museum. They have set policies about what can and canât be removed from the collection, and according to those policies nothing of any historical or monetary value can be given away or sold. And they actively promote the idea that their predecessors had a perfect right to loot the cultural heritage of the world, and that the museum has a perfect right to keep it forever. The only way to get anything out of the British Museum and back to its rightful place would be to completely replace the entire board of the museum with new people who think completely differently. And thatâs not happening any time soon, alas.
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