Following on from the first instalment of this series, let's now address the second essay of the Kathimerini supplement, signed by none other than the director of the new Acropolis Museum, prof. Nikos Stampolidis.
The first line of argument presented is one that is painfully known to all debaters of the Elgin Marbles issue: the firman does not exist now, and therefore, it never existed. If it had existed, the argument goes, it should have been presented to the Select Committee of the UK Parliament in 1816. What was instead presented was -as we all know- an Italian translation produced by Elgin's secretary, Rev.d Hunt, fourteen years after the events. Prof Stampolidis then lays down his three main objections:
1) firmans from the sultans were issued in two copies, one of which went to the addressee and the other to the imperial archives; even conceding the loss of the copy sent to Athens (thanks Prof.!), no amount of research has been able to find the archived copy;
2) the real firmans were sent through special envoys or through captains of the Ottoman war fleet, while this "firman" has been sent to Athens through Rev.d Hunt;
3) the special permission required for what Elgin was asking from the Acropolis was necessary because all the marble (both sculpted and as raw material) belonged to the Sultan, "according to the (unwritten) Ottoman law".
These three premises are not immune from criticism and seem highly problematic. For starters, there is no such thing as a sultanic monopoly of marble, whether raw or worked. It is convenient for Prof. Stampolidis to make a vague reference to an "unwritten" Ottoman law, but the reality -as studied extensively by Nicolas Vatin, among others- is that "the detention and commerce of marble (in the territories under the authority of the Sultan) was authorised", and that the study of Ottoman cemeteries in the 17th and 18th century demonstrate not just the existence but also the diffusion of the private usage and commerce of marble. So myth no. 3 is debunked.
Myth no. 1 relies on the confusion generated by the Western use of the word firman. For an Englishman, a firman can be a passport (as Byron notes in his letters), an order by an Ottoman official of whatever description (as in the firman issued by the Kapudan Pasha for the removal of the Sigeion Inscription), or a specific edict of the Sultan on religious matters. It is only this last very specific sense that a Turk would have understood by the word "firman", and this highly specific document is the one that needs to respect the formal requirements often associated with it (being headed with the monogram of the issuing sultan, being recorded in special registers kept in the imperial archives, being sent tough special envoys, etc). Prof. Stampolidis knows that, yet plays with words to say that the firman was not a firman. This game can work with the average reader of Kathimerini, but not with anyone moderately acquainted with the terms of the debate and who has read the thorough disquisition about what a firman was that was presented to the House of Commons in 1998 by prof Demetriades. On account of all the evidence, what Elgin obtained was a buyuruldu, an official order issued by the deputy Grand Visir to his subalterns, the Governor and Chief Judge of Athens. Such a document, official though it was, could be conveyed through a simple letter and did not need to comply with all the formalities recalled by Stampolidis, but would still be called a "firman" by any Westerner who set eyes on it. It was sent to Athens, and then likely lost when the Greeks burned down the archive of the Voivode during the revolution of 1821. Myth no. 1 is gone.
But there is another point where Stampolidis' narrative falls short. We know that Rev.d Hunt, once he obtained the firman, went straight to Athens accompanied by a moubashir. This was an official imperial courier whose function was to ensure that orders coming from the central government were received, understood, and executed by the peripheric administrators they were directed to. And this is exactly what Rashid Aga, the moubashir accompanying Hunt, does, even threatening the Disdar with capital punishment and his son with a future as a rower in the Sultan's galleys (as described by Hunt in a letter to Elgin just a few days after the facts). Myth no. 2 is then also debunked.
Once we have cleared the air from all the lies presented as clear and uncontestable facts by the director of the Acropolis Museum, once the very foundations of his theory crumble in dust, we can make short work of the rest of his considerations.
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