No theft whatsoever

 

If you only have a passing acquaintance with the story of the Elgin Marbles, chances are that words like "theft", "colonialism", and "repatriation" are part -if not all- of what you know about it. 

The vocal minority of people who want the UK to pack the sculptures up and ship them to Athens will want you to keep it this way. The less you know about the facts, the more likely it is that you will support their cause. 

But if you are here, chances are you may be equipped with a more inquisitive disposition and a willingness to go deeper. So, let's dive in!

Let's start with the main character: Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin and 11th Earl of Kincardine, was a member of the Scottish nobility with a career in the military and a string of high-level appointments in the diplomatic service. He covered the post of British ambassador to Austria, then to Belgium, and lately to Prussia. A career definitely on the up. 

Like every respectable gentleman of his time, Lord Elgin was raised with a classical education. Harrow, Westminster School, law at St Andrew's, plus periods abroad in Paris and Dresden. The cult of the classics is all around him: from the Neoclassical style of the buildings and interiors designed by James and Robert Adam to the classically inspired pottery by Wedgewood, from the proliferation of antiquarian societies up and down the country to the endless stream of published accounts of the Grand Tour. 

People raised like this developed a real sense of urgency for the conservation of a past that had, at one time, the characteristics of both an essential nourishment and an endangered species. 

When in 1799, Lord Elgin was selected for the post of His Bitannic Majesty's representative to the Ottoman court, he immediately saw it as an opportunity to make his own contribution to what he called "the progress of the arts in Britain". After consulting with his architect, Thomas Harrison, he formed a plan for a grand artistic mission to document the antiquities in the Levant. Unfortunately, when he put the plan to the Government for financial support, they refused. Lord Elgin, undeterred, put his money where his mouth was and decided to finance the mission privately. 

Once arrived in Palermo, the British Ambassador, Sir William Hamilton, put him in contact with one of the Neapolitan royal painters, Giovan Battista Lusieri. The two reached an agreement that included a financial settlement and property rights over the outputs of the artistic mission, and Lusieri started assembling his crack team. Then the formatori (mould-makers), draughtsmen, architects, and figure-painters -led by Lusieri, reached Athens in the summer of 1800.  

Athens in the year 1800 was little more than a provincial town, with around 10,000 inhabitants and an Ottoman garrison installed on the Acropolis because of its formidable position commanding the region and overlooking the Saronic Gulf. This is the point where we need clarification because many people -for the most part Greeks- love to talk about "Ottoman-ruled Athens" and "Ottoman occupation", and mark the whole period from the conquest of the city in 1458 to the birth of the new Hellenic state in 1832 as "Turkokratia". This is very misleading. In international law, a military occupation is characterised by its temporary nature (a transitional status between two internationally-recognised peacetime states of affairs) and the absence of a switch in allegiances by the occupied population, i.e. they remain faithful to the government they had before the occupation as the only legitimate recipient of their loyalty. Once a new peace agreement is achieved and people recognise the new government by abiding by the new law, paying taxes, etc, we can no longer talk about occupation. 

What does this mean for Athens in the year 1800? The temporal element comments by itself because, after 342 years, saying something was temporary would be ludicrous. Moreover, the new borders of the Ottoman Empire were internationally recognised, and every Westerner knew that to go to Athens, just to make an example, they needed permission from Istanbul. The subject of allegiance is equally straightforward as the Ottoman had conquered Athens from the Florentine Acciajuoli family, who were the Frank rulers of Athens under the title of Duke of Athens and Neopatra, which had been established after the Fourth Crusade of 1204. Now, I challenge anyone, literally anyone, to prove that the population of Athens in the year of the Lord 1800 was still loyal to the Acciajuoli family and refused to recognize the Sultan as their rightful overlord.  

So, now that we have established that Athens was an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, just like Ankara or Aleppo, we need to return to our artists. Since the Acropolis was a military base and was off-limits for all foreigners, they spent the first few months working on the lower town, taking casts and measurements from the monuments of the Agora, the Olympieion, and in the city all around the slopes of the Acropolis. After a while, they managed to secure access to the Acropolis but only by paying a fee of 5 guineas a day for all the artists, a considerable sum, equivalent to roughly £500 a day in today's money. Tickets to see the Acropolis have never been cheap!

The artists worked under this new arrangement for a few months, from August 1800 to April 1801, drawing, measuring and surveying, but this was all they were allowed to do. Lusieri then met Lord Elgin in Constantinople, and he must have been protesting against this state of affairs because Elgin set off to obtain an official order that would force the Disdar to allow them to work with more freedom and for free. This first firman, which Elgin had sent to Mr Logotheti (the British consul in Athens) before Lusieri left Constantinople, never reached its destination. Some suspect Logotheti of sabotaging the enterprise, but there is no proof that this had been the case. Nevertheless, some access for the mould-makers seems to have been provided, maybe by Logotheti's good contacts with the Ottomans. 

At the beginning of May 1801, Lusieri's luck ran out as the increased military activity of the French prompted the Ottomans to increase security in all military installations. The Disdar got admonished by the Governor and the Chief Judge of Athens and forbidden from letting foreigners enter the citadel any longer without an explicit order from the central government. Lusieri hastily wrote to Elgin about the situation, and on July 1st, Reverend Hunt drew a memo of what they would like to ask the Ottoman government. 

Hunt's draft is preserved and includes the following requests to be made: 

1. "To enter freely within the walls of the Citadel, and to draw, and model with plaster, the Ancient Temples there;
2. to erect scaffolding, and to dig where they may wish to discover the ancient foundations;
3. liberty to take away any sculptures or inscriptions which do not interfere with the works or walls of the Citadel."

And this is exactly what they obtained, as confirmed by Mary Nisbet in a letter to her mother of July 9th: 

"I am happy to tell you Pisani has succeeded a merveille in his Firman from the Porte, Hunt

is in raptures, for the Firman is perfection & P. says he will answer with his whiskers that

it is exact. It allows All our artists to go into the Citadel to copy & model everything in it,

to erect scaffolds all around the Temples, to dig and discover all the ancient foundations

and to bring away any Marbles that may be deemed curious"

A copy of this permission was translated into Italian by explicit request of Rev. Hunt so that he and the artists could know the exact terms and extent of their new-found liberties (as none of them could read Ottoman Turkish). Italian was the lingua franca of the levant at the time, a vehicular language that all merchants used across the region, and that was known even by some of the Ottoman governors (Ali Pasha could speak Italian, for example). The original of the letter, carried to the addresses in Athens by an imperial messenger (mubashir) to ensure it was well-received and duly obeyed, has never been found. The most likely interpretation of this is that it would have been stored in the archives of the Voivode in Athens, which was burned down during the revolution in -or immediately after-1821. 

Regardless of the survival of the original, there can be no doubt about its existence, content, and efficacy. Several Western travellers comment on it, whether to complain about "the permission he [the Sultan] had granted" (Dodwell 1819) or just noting in their diaries that they have indeed seen it (Galt 1833, who mentions the Turkish original). 

Empowered by the new firman, Lusieri and his team started the work, which lasted until November 1802. As it is well-known, the majority of what they removed was lying on the ground, with only part of the metopes and some of the pedimental sculptures actually being taken down from the Parthenon itself. The sculptures, loaded in crates and carted to the lower city, were initially stored in a warehouse next to the house of the British consul Logotheti and then transferred to the port of Piraeus for shipment to England via Malta. 

It was not an easy journey, and between shipwrecks, wartime stops, and new export permissions, all 150 cases with the sculptures were safely in London by 1806. Talking of permissions, there is another bit of documentary evidence we need to refer to. While in Athens, Lusieri continued collecting antiquities on behalf of Lord Elgin even after all the sculptures from the Acropolis had been dispatched. A few years later, in 1809, the relations between Britain and the Porte were not as strong as they had been at the beginning of the century, and the Ottomans were creating all sorts of difficulties in the export of this second collection of antiquities. Elgin contacted Sir Robert Adair, who was the British ambassador at the time, looking for support, and this was agreed upon.

We are lucky to have the Ottoman side of the story, this time through an internal document of the administration found by Professor Eldem in the imperial archives in Istanbul. The memo from 1810 reveals that: 

"during a recent official conversation with the ambassador of England, following the request that permission be granted to transport a few pieces of image-bearing stones which the former ambassador of England by the name of Lord Elgin had purchased in Athens during his embassy and had then placed and loaded into crates to be left there for safekeeping, once this was registered and inscribed in the report for Your Highness to see, as Your servant’s memorandum, which was submitted to Your most bountiful and khedivial person was honored in the top margin by Your Majesty’s most powerful imperial decree suggesting that it should be discussed;

after the said issue was discussed with Your servants worthy of consultation, it has been verified that figure-bearing stones of this kind have previously been given to the English and the fact that the aforementioned ambassador’s petition in this respect has not yet been granted is not due to an expected inconvenience, but rather to the intention of letting some time go by and pass so that the matter gain in importance and that at the end it can be said that the imperial permission was obtained as a sign of deference to the ambassador;  

hence, as it was agreed upon and approved following discussion that there was no harm in ceding them,..." (Eldem 2011)

This document serves as another indirect confirmation, if we ever needed another, of the fact that "stones of this kind have previously been given" to Lord Elgin, an obvious reference to the happenings of July 1801. Note also the difference between the stones that "have been given" before, and those that "Lord Elgin had purchased" now. 

So, here you have it: a big difference between the propaganda of the Hellenic Government and its British apologists on one side and the careful work of historical reconstruction brought forward by academics worldwide. No theft ever took place, the Marbles were not stolen, and Elgin's title was bulletproof, allowing him to pass it on to the British Nation where it currently lays, entrusted to the careful care of the British Museum.    

And if you think about it, the very idea of a foreign diplomat entering a military base, taking tons and tons of sculpted architectural members without permission under the nose of the commander and its garrison, employing hundreds of labourers for months, and then shipping everything off, is just...ridiculous.