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General News
Meropi Kyriacou Honored as TNH Educator of the Year
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
LONDON – The new head of the British Museum, Nicholas Cullinan, said his idea to solve the problem of keeping the stolen Parthenon Marbles there is the same one that was offered to Greece by officials there: share them, not return them.
Cullinan said the museum is bound by a 1963 law not to return stolen goods and those plundered from former colonies, although he didn’t say it could if the law is changed, as has been urged by its critics.
Museum Chairman George Osborne previously offered Greece a sharing deal which would stipulate that the marbles taken off the Parthenon 200 years earlier by Scottish diplomat Lord Elgin belong to the British, not the Greeks.
That was rejected out of hand by Greek Culture Minister Lina Mendoni who said they are stolen and Greece wants their outright return, not a deal in which they would be temporarily loaned to Greece.
That would have included Greece sending the museum other valuable artifacts to be held hostage until the marbles – seen being sent to the Acropolis Museum in Athens in rotating batches – being sent back to London.
“I would hope that some form of partnership is possible and I think definitely something we’ll want to take forward,” Cullinan told the BBC, emphasizing that the museum was open to “collaboration” only.
Cullinan told the BBC that the British Museum could try out a “lending library” model, whereby the institution could temporarily allow objects in its collection to travel. He said he wanted to “do something positive” for the institution.
British Museum officials said previously that Greece didn’t have a proper place to display them – discounting the Parthenon itself – but the Acropolis Museum opened in 2009 with a top floor of glass walls designed to display them with a view of the Parthenon.
Since then the British Museum has swiveled to other arguments in the face of growing international pressure to send them back to Greece, which it has rejected, turning to the idea of sharing them with Greece, from where they were stolen.
That intensified after a senior curator at the museum was accused of stealing almost 2,000 pieces and putting them up for sale on online sites but still hasn’t been prosecuted over it.
That led to the former director, Hartwig Fischer – a German who had said the theft of the marbles was a “creative act,” stepping down but now being appointed head of a new Museum of World Cultures in Saudi Arabia.
