Appeal launched for Lady of Karpathos to be displayed in Greece

An online petition by the The Karpathos Lady website has been launched asking the British Museum and the Greek Ministry of Culture to negotiate the loan of a 6,000-year-old statue for exhibition in Greece.

The statue, a female deity, was smuggled off the island of Karpathos in 1885 by the British adventurer Theodore Bent, who sold it to the British Museum.

In 2014 the statue, known as the “Karpathos Lady,” started a touring exhibition as part of a BBC/British Museum radio series titled “A History of the World in 100 Objects.”

Her tour included Taiwan, Australia, China, France and Hong Kong but not Greece.