Originally published 2021-10-01.
In late September 2021, at its 22nd session, UNESCO's Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin adopted a decision on the Parthenon Sculptures. According to Greece's culture minister, Lina Mendoni, the committee urged the United Kingdom to reconsider its position and to open talks with Greece, and accepted that the dispute is a matter between two governments, not simply a question for the British Museum. It was the first time the committee had issued a decision devoted specifically to the sculptures, and Athens hailed it as a significant step.
The decision did not move a single piece of marble, and the British position did not change overnight. To understand why it still mattered, it helps to know what the sculptures are, how they reached London, and what has happened since.
What UNESCO's committee said in 2021
The committee is an advisory body. It cannot order a state to return anything; its role is to encourage negotiation and mediation when one country asks another for cultural objects. Greece first brought the Parthenon case to it in 1984, and the issue had sat on the agenda for decades.
In 2021 Greece secured two outcomes. One was a general recommendation, which Mendoni said referred to concerns about how the sculptures are displayed in London. The other was the dedicated decision on the Parthenon Sculptures. Summarising it the following day, Mendoni said the committee had recognised "the issue is of an intergovernmental nature", contrary to the British argument that the matter belongs to the museum's trustees, and that Greece had a legitimate claim to the sculptures' return. She described the result as a particularly significant development and thanked the Greek delegation and Greece's permanent representation to UNESCO.
That framing is important. Successive British governments have said the sculptures are the property of the British Museum's independent trustees, and that the law prevents the museum from giving them away. By calling the case intergovernmental, the committee pushed back against the idea that London could simply stay out of it.
What the Parthenon Sculptures are
The Parthenon was built on the Acropolis of Athens between 447 and 432 BC as a temple to the goddess Athena. Its sculptural decoration, created under the direction of the sculptor Phidias, is among the most celebrated art of the ancient world. It had three main parts:
- The frieze, a band of carved relief about 160 metres long, showing a great procession, usually linked to the Panathenaic festival in Athena's honour.
- The metopes, 92 square panels showing mythical battles, including the fight between the Lapiths and the centaurs.
- The pediments, the triangular gables at each end, filled with large figures showing the birth of Athena and her contest with Poseidon for Athens.
The British Museum holds about 75 metres of the frieze, 15 metopes and about 21 figures from the pediments, along with a caryatid from the neighbouring Erechtheion and pieces from other buildings on the Acropolis. Roughly half of the surviving Parthenon sculpture is in Athens, with smaller fragments scattered across other European museums.
How they came to London
At the start of the nineteenth century Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire. Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, was Britain's ambassador in Constantinople. Between 1801 and 1812 his agents removed a large share of the sculpture still on the Parthenon and nearby monuments and shipped it to Britain, at great personal cost to Elgin.
Elgin said he acted under a permit, or firman, from Ottoman authorities issued in 1801. The original has never been found. What survives is an Italian translation, and historians disagree about whether it allowed him to saw sculpture off the buildings rather than simply draw, measure and collect fallen fragments. In 2024 a Turkish official told a UNESCO meeting that no document legalising the removals had been found in the Ottoman archives, which strengthened the Greek argument.
Deep in debt, Elgin sold the collection to the British government. In 1816 Parliament voted to buy it for £35,000, less than half of what he had spent, and placed it in the British Museum. Later legislation, the British Museum Act 1963, bars the trustees from disposing of objects in the collection except in narrow circumstances, which is why the museum says it cannot simply hand them back.
There is a further sore point. In the late 1930s museum staff scraped and cleaned some sculptures to make them look whiter, removing part of the original surface in places. The museum has since acknowledged that mistakes were made.
The case for return, and the museum's reply
Greece has asked for the sculptures since soon after independence, and made a formal request for all of them in 1983, a campaign closely associated with the actress and culture minister Melina Mercouri. Its main arguments are that the sculptures were removed under foreign occupation without valid permission, and that they form part of a single monument which can only be properly understood when reunited, within sight of the Parthenon itself.
The answer to the old British objection that Athens had nowhere suitable to keep them opened in 2009: the Acropolis Museum, a few hundred metres from the temple. Its top-floor gallery lays out the surviving frieze in its original order and orientation, with the London sections shown as pale plaster casts and empty spaces, a striking visual argument for reunification.
The British Museum's case is that the sculptures were legally acquired, that they are seen there by millions of visitors in the context of world history, and that it is open to lending objects but not to giving up ownership. Greece has generally refused any arrangement that requires it to recognise British ownership.
What happened after the UNESCO decision
The 2021 decision was followed by real, if uneven, movement. In 2022 Greek and British representatives held talks about a possible partnership, with the museum's chairman, the former chancellor George Osborne, publicly exploring ideas such as an exchange of loans. Other institutions moved more quickly: a fragment from the Parthenon frieze held in Palermo was returned to Athens in 2022, and in 2023 the Vatican Museums sent back three fragments as a gift from Pope Francis.
Diplomatic tensions flared in November 2023 when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak cancelled a planned meeting with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis after Mitsotakis, in a BBC interview, compared the division of the sculptures to cutting the Mona Lisa in half. Downing Street said the sculptures belonged in the British Museum. In 2025 the debate continued in Greece and Britain, but as of October 2026 the sculptures remain in London.
Why this dispute keeps returning
The Parthenon case is the best-known example of a much wider conversation about museums and objects taken during periods of empire or occupation. Museums in Europe and North America have returned looted artefacts such as the Benin Bronzes in growing numbers, and each return renews the question of why the Parthenon sculptures should be treated differently.
For readers following the story, the key points are simple. UNESCO's committee can encourage talks but cannot force a return. British law currently restricts what the museum can do. And Greece's goal is not a loan but a reunited monument. Any lasting solution will have to bridge those positions, which is why a 2021 committee decision still gets cited years later.
Sources: Greek City Times, 1 October 2021: Mendoni on the UNESCO committee decision; Wikipedia: Elgin Marbles.
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