Without relinquishing jurisdiction – Newspaper Kommersant No. 33 (7478) dated February 22, 2023

The Greek government has initiated a law that removes the five major museums of antiquities in the country from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture and Sports. We are talking about the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, the Athenian Byzantine and Christian Museum, the Thessaloniki Archaeological Museum and the Museum of Byzantine Culture and the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion in Crete. Archaeologists have been protesting against the law for several weeks now, and museum staff have joined in in recent days.

A law to change the management system of the main Greek museums was passed on February 13th. This was preceded by long debates and protests by the Greek Association of Archaeologists, but the center-right government, led by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, ignored the opinion of the professional community. Minister of Culture and Sports Lina Mendoni supported the law, which, in fact, fixes the loss of her ministry of control over museums. Party discipline proved stronger than departmental interests: Mendoni said the move was aimed at modernizing museums, citing “the need to change the way specific state museums are managed and to expand their activities and activities.” In response, all five interested museums closed. The strike continues.

What is the essence of this conflict? Instead of a museum director appointed by the Ministry of Culture, Greek museums will receive councils whose members will be appointed by the government. That is, instead of professional archaeologists, who traditionally have always held the positions of directors of these museums, they will be led by “effective managers”, whose appointment can strongly correlate with the politics of one or another party that won the elections. On the one hand, there is a purely managerial desire to relieve the state of responsibility for the full provision of museums (under the new law, museums will be able to independently attract additional funding, which, if successful, will greatly facilitate their existence, both in terms of reconstruction and in the case of various exhibition projects ). On the other hand, the new law may change the situation with Greek antiquities once taken out of the country by the colonial authorities, black archaeologists, private individuals or Greek refugees. That is, we are talking about those issues of restitution of artistic values ​​that have so far been the most painful for the Greek cultural authorities.

It was on this occasion that the various political forces of Greece clashed. Alexis Tsipras, head of the left-wing Syriza party and former prime minister of the country, was quick to say that “culture and people of culture are again being persecuted.” Syriza members abstained from voting on the law. Tsipras was referring to the part of the new law that regulates the long-term “export” of certain antiquities. The law allows “export” as a “temporary” practice of extended loan agreements that would allow looted antiquities to remain abroad for years to come. I must say that there are grounds for such fears: in early November 2022, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the signing of an agreement known as a memorandum of understanding between the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports, the private Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens (MCA) and the Metropolitan, according to which 161 the Cycladic artifact from the collection of millionaire businessman Leonard N. Stern will be on display in the New York Museum for 25 years, and only then will these controversial items return to their homeland. Postponing the solution of a problem for a quarter of a century is almost the same as not solving it at all.

Until now, the position of Prime Minister Mitsotakis on the need to return antiquities to Greece has been very consistent. First of all, he was interested in the “Elgin marbles”, the sculptures of the Athenian Parthenon, exhibited in the British Museum (“Kommersant” wrote about this on January 12). In December last year, he held secret talks with the chairman of the British Museum Board of Trustees, George Osborne, at which they discussed possible options for resolving this issue. However, the new law seems to be specifically written to make a deal with the British Museum to “lease” the 2,500-year-old Parthenon marbles, instead of continuing to fight for their full return and not relinquish ownership. According to journalists from various Greek media outlets, the British Museum has proposed an agreement under which some of the marbles can be sent to Greece, while the rest will remain hostage in London. Greece, in return, will have to borrow other exhibits to fill the vacated space in the museum.

Greek Minister of Culture Mendoni categorically denies this information: “I repeat once again: the position of the Greek government regarding the sculptures of the Parthenon is that it does not recognize the jurisdiction, ownership and ownership of the British Museum.” Given that elections in Greece will be held this spring, no one here takes anyone’s word for it. The archaeological community, however, is alarmed in earnest: more than a thousand people turned out to protest, and the doors of the striking museums of antiquities are increasingly closed than open.

Kira Dolinina