The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and Greece are discussing the possible repatriation of two marble works from the Acropolis. If an agreement comes to pass, it could increase pressure on the British Museum to relinquish its Parthenon Marbles.
The Austrian Foreign Minister, Alexander Schallenber, has announced that “technical talks are currently under way” between the Vienna institution and the Acropolis Museum in Athens. They focus on “the possibility of a loan” of the small 2,500-year-old marbles works in its collection.
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The Associated Press reports that the Greek representative, Nikos Dendias, expressed “deep satisfaction” with the development, but has not shared details of the in-progress loan agreement.
“This will add to a series of highly symbolic gestures that may create a positive momentum” for the long-sought repatriation of the marbles from the British Museum, Dendias added.
In recent months, Greece has seen a slew of foreign institutions return the fragments of the Acropolis frieze and pediment in their collections.
In January, a museum in Palermo, Sicily, sent back its piece of the 520-foot-long frieze that once wrapped around the façade of the Parthenon Temple: a foot broken off a likeness of the goddess Artemis. Shortly after, Pope Francis returned three fragments of the Parthenon Marbles housed in the Vatican Museums, a move the Catholic leader described as a “donation” to His Beatitude Ieronymos II, the Orthodox Christian Archbishop of Athens and all of Greece, rather than a proper repatriation.
“So, [Vienna’s] will be the third one,” Dendias said. “And this, for us, is of huge importance.”
Late last year it was revealed that the British Museum was in talks with Greece over a potential agreement that would see some of the Parthenon Marbles return to Athens. The two parties had been secretly meeting for months about the contested antiquities, which have been on view in the British Museum since 1832, after being stripped from the Acropolis in Athens by the Scottish nobleman Lord Elgin. While British Museum chairman George Osborne has in recent months signaled a willingness to forge a deal to settle the centuries-old controversy, any plan that sees the works return to Greece has yet to advance beyond hypotheticals.