Returned artifacts put on display
The presidents of Greece and Italy yesterday opened an exhibition of more than 80 illegally excavated ancient treasures returned from US and European museums and private collections. Both antiquities-rich countries have suffered badly from looters and have joined forces to fight the scourge. «Our two peoples have experienced… the sense of injustice caused by that criminal activity,» Greek Culture Minister Michalis Liapis said. «Our history has been turned into a commodity.» Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and his Greek counterpart Karolos Papoulias inaugurated the exhibition, which runs until December 31. The core of the show was displayed earlier this year in Rome. Exhibits include ornately painted clay vases from the 6th to the 4th centuries BC, marble statues and frescoes from Pompeii. Most came from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In all cases, Greek and Italian authorities were able to prove the works had been looted and illegally exported. The Athens venue is the still-unfinished New Acropolis Museum, where Greece hopes one day to display the Elgin Marbles beside its own collection of sculptures from the 2,500-year-old Parthenon temple. The British Museum has rebuffed repeated Greek requests for the return of the works, removed by Scottish diplomat Lord Elgin 200 years ago when Greece was an unwilling subject of the Ottoman Empire. But Greece’s campaign received a moral boost Tuesday when Napolitano handed over a small fragment of the Parthenon frieze kept for two centuries in a museum in Palermo, Sicily. The marble piece, the foot and lower leg of a relief sculpture of the goddess Artemis, will remain in Athens as a permanent loan. Next month, Italian authorities plan to hand over two more small fragments of the Parthenon sculptures from the collections of the Vatican Museums. Napolitano and Papoulias fitted the 35-by-34-centimeter Palermo piece into position among matching fragments from the Greek museum’s collections. «May this be the forerunner in healing the wounds the sacred site suffered with the removal of the Parthenon Marbles,» Papoulias said. (AP)
