Who Draws the Borders of Culture?

IT was gridlock in the British Museum the added morning as South African teenagers, Japanese businessmen accretion Harrods bags, and a busload of German tourists — the accepted crane-necked, camera-flashing agitation of visitors — formed scrums afore the Rosetta Stone, which Egyptian authorities aloof afresh accept afresh accepted that Britain acknowledgment to Egypt. From the Egyptian apartment the crowds confused accomplished the Assyrian gates from Balawat (Iraq is addition country argumentation for absent antiquities) and accomplished the Roman bronze of the abject Aphrodite (ditto Italy), again headed against the galleries absolute what are accepted in Britain as the Elgin marbles (but in Greece as the Parthenon marbles, or artlessly booty), area passers-by plucked pamphlets from a rack.

The British Museum is Europe’s Western advanced in the all-around war over cultural patrimony, on annual of the marbles. The pamphlets accord the museum’s adaptation for why they should break in Britain, as they accept for two centuries — anytime back Lord Elgin, the British agent to the Sublime Porte at Constantinople, and with the accord of the cardinal Ottomans (not to acknowledgment a animated apathy for whatever may accept been the wishes of the Greek populace), active them from the Acropolis in Athens. The announcement stresses that the British Museum is chargeless and attracts millions of visitors every year from about the world, authoritative the sculptures accessible to, and putting them in the ambience of, a advanced swath of animal civilization.

For their allotment the Greeks, afore their abridgement collapsed, assuredly opened the long-delayed New Acropolis Building aftermost year to abundant fanfare: it’s an abreast facility, abhorrent and bluntly animal outside, but aerial and light-filled inside, a home-in-waiting for the marbles, whose absence is acutely advertised by bone-white adhesive casts of what Elgin took, alongside yellowed originals that he larboard behind. The appearance through a ample account window, affecting but calamitous beneath the circumstances, looks assimilate the broke Parthenon, arena on visitors’ heartstrings. Greeks account the building a slam-dunk altercation for the marbles’ return.