Parthenon Marbles Meet Hollywood as Amal Alamuddin Clooney Advises Greece
The human rights barrister Amal Alamuddin Clooney flew into Athens on Monday amid hopes that, as she begins advising the government on its bid to reclaim the Parthenon marbles, it will be with the full force of Hollywood behind her.
The Anglo-Lebanese lawyer wades into the west’s longest running cultural row at noon on Tuesday when she meets the Greek culture minister, Kostas Tasoulas, for talks in his sixth-floor office.
There, with the two QCs Geoffrey Robertson and Norman Palmer, both experts in cultural restitution, she will discuss how Greece can best pursue its claim to win back the treasures, widely seen as the high point of classical art, from the British Museum.
In the ever-bitter battle of nerves that the heritage dispute has become, the meeting, for many, is already a coup.
“We need all the friends we can get,” Tasoulas, a British-trained lawyer himself, told the Guardian ahead of the talks.
“After all, this is a unique monument of universal significance that can only be understood and admired if it is complete. Mutilated it cannot tell the whole story,” he said of the carvings that were carted off to Britain more than 200 years ago after Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, removed them from the frieze that once adorned the Parthenon.
For Greeks, the 36-year-old Alamuddin is a valuable advocate of the argument that Phidias’s masterpieces would be better off under the Attic skies, in the place where they were originally carved in the fifth century BC. Although the most junior of the London-based lawyers who will sit around the long table assigned for such meetings in the minister’s office, she brings glamour that the Greek government could only have dreamed of when her firm, Doughty Chambers, first took up the case in 2011.
This week’s talks, both with Tasoulas and prime minister Antonis Samaras on Wednesday, were meant to have taken place in early September but were postponed when it was unexpectedly announced that Alamuddin and George Clooney, the world’s most sought after bachelor, were to be married.
Barely three weeks after the couple exchanged vows in Venice, Greek officials are determined not to waste the opportunity. “We will of course be discussing all our legal options but what we really want is to keep the issue alive,” one well-placed policy maker confided. “There would be no better way of doing that than getting Hollywood involved and, hopefully, Clooney too.”
In many ways the American actor has already obliged. Earlier this year, as he and co-stars addressed the media to promote the film The Monuments Men – which tells the story of how a team of allied men and women helped recover priceless artworks stolen by the Nazis – Clooney took the audience by surprise when he said the sculptures belonged to Athens.
“I think you have a very good case to make about your artefacts,” he said when asked about the antiquities by a Greek reporter. “Returning them [would be] a very fair and very nice thing … the right thing to do.”
Even now, nearly 40 years after the issue of repatriation was first raised by the late actor Melina Mercouri, the Greeks still speak of a “win-win” situation where the dispute is settled amicably.
The construction of a splendid museum at the foot of the Acropolis, purpose built to house the antiquities within view of the masterpiece that epitomises the Periclean age, was meant to be a debate shifter, more eloquent than any number of legal arguments.
For decades, British officials had argued that Athens had nowhere decent enough to exhibit the monuments.
When that failed and the goalposts were perceived to have been moved again – with British Museum trustees saying exhibiting the marbles in London “allows different complementary stories to be told about them” – Greece resorted to diplomatic channels.
In July 2013, it called on Unesco, the United Nations’ cultural organisation, to intervene, urging David Cameron’s government to participate in “a mediation procedure” in a bid to resolve the row. Fifteen months later, Greek officials say they have yet to receive an answer to their request.
“All we have asked is that they talk about this, but they have not had the decency to reply,” said Elena Korka, a senior official at the culture ministry. “This is a non-binding process so at the very least the British stance would seem to show fear.”
Earlier this month, at its meeting of committee members in Paris, Unesco berated Britain for failing to respond to Greece and recommended that the two countries meet to discuss a “mutually acceptable solution”.
It is in this context that Samaras, a former culture minister, has pursued the legal route. Talks this week will focus on what court, if any, Greece could initiate a case in the future.
“In politics all over the world the word never does not exist,” said the culture minister. “We are open to everything, all forms of cooperation.”
In the past Athens has offered all manner of cultural gems in exchange for the marbles. And bolstered by successive polls that have shown the vast majority of Britons to be in favour of repatriation it has put aside the issue of ownership, instead proposing joint curatorship of the sculptures through the establishment of a branch of the British Museum in Athens.
“There are no legal grounds for the return of the marbles,” averred Harry Tzalas, a historian who first advised Melina Mercouri on the issue. “And anyway this is not the right time for Greece to start a legal procedure when the country is in such difficult straits financially and socially,” he told the Guardian. “Alamuddin and Clooney are using this row for their own public relations purposes. Our best line of defence would be to concentrate on the British public which seems to want the marbles back in Greece.”
TheGuardian,
Helena Smith