The British Museum Says It Will Never Return the Elgin Marbles

Defending Their Removal as a ‘Creative Act’

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British Museum director Hartwig Fischer is facing international backlash after defending an English nobleman’s removal of sculptures from the Parthenon in the early 1800s as a “creative act,” and reiterated that the museum’s trustees would not support repatriating them to Athens.

In a recent interview with the Greek daily newspaper Ta Nea, Fischer said that when museums offer a new context to engage with cultural heritage they are being creative. “When you move cultural heritage into a museum, you move it out of context. Yet that displacement is also a creative act,” Fischer said.

The museum director’s comments have already sparked rebuke. “The imperialist patronage of the British Museum has no limits,” George Vardas, secretary of the international association for the reunifications of the Parthenon sculptures, told the Greek paper. Vardas said that Fischer’s comments came from a place of “amazing historical revisionism and arrogance.”

“What is the creative cause of the destruction of the temple and the plundering of the keys of the ancient history of a nation?” he asked.



I think it’s wrong and I get the Greek arguement, but they’ve been in the British Museum long enough that I’d argue it’s now ingrained in the history of the museum as well. Hell, moreso than the history of any Greek alive today.