Boris Johnson was against removing the Parthenon Marble

The guardian found and published A private letter written by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2012, when he was mayor of London, said that the Parthenon Marbles in Athens should never be taken by the British.

This is an issue that I have thought about deeply for many years. It is clear that in an ideal world, the Parthenon Marbles would never have been removed from the Acropolis and would now be able to be seen “on site”.

However, Johnson added in the letter that since the stone balls have now been in the British Museum in London for more than 250 years, removing them and returning them to Athens would be a “grave and irreparable loss”. Johnson concluded the letter by saying, “Although I sympathize with the cause of the return of the marbles to Athens, I must defend London’s interests in return.”

Johnson wrote the letter in response to an appeal sent to him by a local politician from the Greek New Democracy party in the Elis region, where the ancient city of Olympia is located. The appeal was written on March 28, 2012, two months before the Olympic flame was lit at Olympia and the British delegation (which also consisted of Johnson) went to pick it up to take it to the UK in light of those Olympic Games in London. .

The appeal requested that the United Kingdom return to Greece the Parthenon marbles, sculptural groups and friezes which had once been in the main temple of the Acropolis in Athens, and which had been removed in the early nineteenth century and brought to England by Count Elgin, the ambassador. to the Ottoman Empire (of which Greece was a part).

The return of the glass globes has been discussed for years, and recently Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis ask again United Kingdom to return them to Greece. But since becoming prime minister in 2019, Johnson has never wanted to address the issue. Last March, in an interview with the Greek newspaper t nya He defended the British Museum’s possession of the balls as legitimate, and last week after a meeting with Mitsotakis in London, he had make it known Through a government spokesperson whose job is not to deal with the problem but the British Museum.

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