Peace by piece

It is time to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece

Note: We have two events for “Take Me to the River” coming up - Thursday Nov 21, Kinlochewe village hall and Thursday Nov 27, Waterstones, Glasgow Xmas shopping event

Photo by Walter Kemp Bruce

Impressions from Athens

FOR A WHILE, it looked as if Britain might finally be about to return the Parthenon Sculptures to Greece as a long-term loan - but latest reports suggest the issue has been quietly kicked into the long grass.

Britain today feels divided, inward-looking, and isolated. The government seems timid and fearful - fretting the populist right would see the return of the sculptures as weakness, or that the floodgates would open and everyone would want their stuff back.

The British Museum angered Greece by throwing a fundraising party near the Marbles last month, inviting celebrities such as Mick Jagger. That read as disrespectful.

Returning the sculptures would be a powerful symbol of hope and faith in the future. Britain would not lose by returning them - all Europeans would gain the opportunity to see them reunited in another of our great cities.

Here are some of my impressions from my trip to Athens last week.

The Parthenon Museum: Greeks bearing giffs

Image from the animated film

Every visitor to the Parthenon Museum sees an animated film on the top floor. It shows cartoon figures - men employed by Thomas Bruce aka Lord Elgin - sitting atop the Parthenon with hammers and chisels, breaking off the priceless artefacts.

Bruce is my married name, so I felt a particular sense of aidos - Greek for shame - as I watched. Even the 4th-century barbarians, the Visigoths, only carrried off what was lying around; they didn’t smash anything.

The Parthenon Museum opened in 2009. It is one of the finest in the world. For sixteen years, the Brits’ assertion that they can care for the sculptures better than the Greeks has been bootless.

I am blessed - or perhaps cursed with a vivid imagination. After my visit, I dreamt that I could hear the broken marbles in their echoing hall in London whispering that they want to go home, where a place of honour has been prepared for them. I have decided personally to avoid the British Museum until they are restored.

Bad boy at home but a hero in Greece

Gordon/ Byron by Tomas Phillips in the Benaki Museum of Culture

You might have come across Lord Byron if you enjoy the Regency romances of Georgette Heyer. He’s the bad boy who arrives late at balls, leans against the wall scowling and refusing to dance, before leaving after half an hour - annoying the hostess yet lending the party instant cachet.

He didn’t dance because he couldn’t. He had a club foot (TPV) and loved swimming because in the water he was unhampered by it. (He features in our book Take Me to the River.)

Byron, whose name was George Gordon, is remembered in Britain mainly for poetry and scandal. He had many lovers. One, Lady Caroline Lamb, called him “mad, bad and dangerous to know” and made him the villain of her novel.

It is less well known that, in Greece, he is a hero. In central Athens, a statue shows Byron being crowned with laurels by the spirit of Greece, depicted as a woman.

Byron died here aged thirty-six of a fever, having come to fight for Greek freedom. He donated much of his fortune to the cause. His influence is credited with helping to bring Britain - and other great powers - on side.

Byron and the spirit of Greece

The Bookstall: Discovering Greece’s Modern History

A paperback I read in cafes - and at the lake

Athens is full of street stalls selling snacks - and books. At one, I asked for a book about Greek history, and the stall holder pulled Roderick Beaton’s Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation out from the colourful heaps of best-sellers.

Beaton argues that Greece is too often overlooked in European history. When Greece emerged in the 1820s, it was the first modern nation state - replacing the old imperial model that had defined Europe for centuries.

Between its ancient and modern incarnations, Greece was first part of the Roman Empire, then the Ottoman. (It was a departing Ottoman official who supposedly gave Elgin a dubious letter permitting him to take what he wanted from the Acropolis.)

It was also a Greek, Rigas Feraios, who conceived the idea of civic nationalism - the inclusive model the SNP now espouses. He believed that everyone, whatever their religion or ethnicity, could belong to the new Greece. Women, too, were to serve in the army, although he spent more time on planning the uniforms than military strategy - red boots apparently. (My young associates joked that for some people who would not be keen on military service, red boots could make a difference.)

Rigas was executed by the Ottoman state in 1798 when the struggle for independence was only beginning. The story that follows is pretty grim - atrocities, civil war, displacement, and hardship.

Byron became the best-known of the Philhellenes - educated Europeans who joined the Greek cause. They saw Greece as the cradle of European thought and culture - the birthplace of ideals that we still hold today of democracy, reasoned argument, and free speech. The Romantic poet Shelley wrote, “We are all Greeks.”

Greece today: the return

From the Financial Times

The Financial Times reported that Greece is suffering a startling birth-rate collapse. The state has had to close one in twenty schools. The number of women aged 20–40 has fallen by a third in two decades, and in 2023 there were twice as many deaths as births.

Younger readers may only vaguely remember the financial catastrophe that struck Greece between 2010 and 2015. The country joined the Eurozone when borrowing was cheap; debt soared; and when the global crash came, Greece went bust.

The EU’s handling of the crisis tested its solidarity - and it faltered. Bailouts came with punishing austerity. Greek politicians considered leaving the Eurozone but decided it was too dangerous - the risk of a social and currency collapse was too great. They were aware of what had happened in Russia two decades earlier

My father, Arnold Kemp, wrote in The Herald in 1992 that through scheduled debt payments, the West proposed to exact a catastrophic net capital transfer from East Europe and the former Soviet Union in that year.:

“If Russia relapses into autocracy, then we in the West will carry some of the guilt.”

I happened to visit Russia a couple of years later when the currency was collapsing - it was horrific: old women prostituted themselves for the price of a pint of milk. You paid for your dinner with a pile of notes three inches high.

Greece chose another path - hanging on by its fingernails to the EU. One upside of EU membership was that it was relatively easy for educated, young Greeks to move to other parts of Europe. Between 2010 and 2021, more than 600,000 did - the biggest exodus since the Second World War.

Now, for the first time since the crash, the tide may be turning. The government is sending delegations of employers across Europe - from London to Amsterdam - to persuade their lost generation to come home.

“Greece is no longer the same country they left,” says Labour Minister Niki Kerameus. “At first, they see us as representatives of the state that pushed them away.”

To lure them back, there’s a seven-year, 50 per cent income-tax cut for returnees, and job fairs where companies like Aegean, Deloitte, and Lidl recruit on the spot.

The FT quoted Avgousta Stanitsa, an architect and AI researcher who returned to Athens after a decade in the UK, hired at a job fair while five months pregnant:

“I was impressed that my pregnancy wasn’t seen as a barrier. It felt like attitudes in Greece were shifting — around work, motherhood, and culture.”

Better together

For the first time in twenty years, there are more autocracies than democracies in the world. We don’t yet know which way the United States will go - the Guardian recently predicted intense voter suppression at next year's mid-term elections.

The UK, meanwhile, stands isolated. The rift with Europe has damaged the economy - we are still counting the cost. The UK government so far has done little to change direction.

The European Union has always been about more than trade. It is about democracies sticking together, the rule of law, cooperation.

In a small but important way, hanging on to the Parthenon Marbles when UNESCO has told Britain to give them back, is a symbol of contempt for all of those professed values. We should take a leaf out of Byron’s book and return them.

From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron’s long narrative travel poem