Amal Alamuddin in Greece for talks about the Elgin marbles

Sevens wrote:

Katiedot wrote:Wow, a woman runs up to her and embraces her, thanking her for trying to bring the marbles back.  Amal just laughs it off.

Lucky this woman was thanking Amal because the security there was asleep!

Lucky it's a woman....if there's a random man coming up to her then trying to hug her...George must do something about this chaos upon his wife.

Well this is the downside when you leak all your movements in advance to the press so they can get photos. This is the downside of courting fame. If Amal/Clooney and her firm didn't try and make a PR spectacle of her visit to Greece none of this would have happened.

Courting and trying to play the media is like making a pact with the devil. You don't tell the media when to leave and YOU don't decide when they are around and when they aren't. Look at Bieber's life. Bennifer, Brangelina etc.

George and Amal have no one to blame but themselves. If he'd had a private wedding and never sold the pictures to every magazine in every country in the world, plus the constant leak of stories by Stan to try and turn this woman into "the new Lady Diana" there just wouldn't be this hype around her and she would have about the same amount of fame as Matt Damon's wife Luciana. 

It's for precisely this reason that many celebrities like to keep their movements low key unless they are attending premieres etc where appropriate measures are in place. Wouldn't be surprised if there are a few incidents around the Danesfield House event coming up. Again, George's people leaked everything in advance so they are inviting trouble. The incident during the Greek trip is indeed scary as Amal could have been killed. Welcome to fame Amal. You wanted it, courted it, and now you've got it. Carolyn Bessette couldn't cope but she was much less of an attention seeker than Amal. And Carolyn Bessette dated JFK Junior for years before they married so she had a longer adjustment period.

globalchick wrote:
Courting and trying to play the media is like making a pact with the devil. You don't tell the media when to leave and YOU don't decide when they are around and when they aren't. Look at Bieber's life. Bennifer, Brangelina etc.

You don't get it.
It is not the actor(s) or the media that decides, it's the PUBLIC. It's about PUBLIC interest.

If there is interest from the PUBLIC, the media will follow no matter what. All the actors can do, is try to avoid the media and paparazzi and use that interest on them for good.

If there is no PUBLIC interest, courting the media, will do nothing. The media follows the PUBLIC interest.

I have no problem with George selling the wedding photos. If the media is going to make money out of you, at least that away some of the money will go to the people that need it. The money from the sales can save lives or help someone have a better life.

I don't know why George gave them so many photos though. This is what the editor of People said

As waiters handed out crab croquettes, Jess Cagle, the editor of People magazine, talked about the recent weddings of Mr. Pitt and his buddy George Clooney, which were both featured in exclusive coverage in his magazine. Mr. Cagle seemed to imply that Mr. Clooney provided more bang for the buck. “He gave us 50 photos,” he said. “It was amazing.”

Angelina and Brad only gave them, as they always do about 10 photos. George shouldn't give them that many.

Jess Caggle from People said that Clooney gave them 50 wedding photos while Pitt gave them less than 10.

As an example, this is one of the projects the money from the sales of Angelina and Brad's twins photos went to.

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It's  a HIV/AIDS and TB Care Center in Ethiopia that open this year. It's similar to a center they have in Cambodia that is part of the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Foundation.

This saves lives!

Why shouldnt George give them that many photos?
The more the better if I'm gonna buy the magazine...
It's a four-day celebration weekend with 170 guests of course they're offering more photos.
Brad&Angie's wedding is small and theres not really much to report.
Anticipations are already high for George's wedding exclusives because we've all followed each outing on the boat with tons of photos. Readers naturally want to know more details.

MeganMorris - IMO, you and globalchick are both right. If there was no public interest there would be no coverage BUT many stars/celebrities seek out coverage to create public interest and further their careers. It's a symbiotic relationship.

When you get to George's level of stardom you don't need to court the media for coverage. Allowing them access to your life becomes a means of controlling what goes public and keeping the frenzy to a minimum. It also allows George to raise money for humanitarian projects. He's playing the game he has to play the best way he knows how.

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Came across this image from the Greece trip. Looking at her knees she has lost so much weight and is on the verge of skeletal. She's entered Angelina Jolie territory I'm afraid. Her body fat is very very low. Most of the pictures that were published of Amal were head shots or from the waist up and didn't show this. 

It's not easy to get this thin and requires a lot of dieting from where she was 9 months ago. Someone posted the pictures in the "Is this love thread" of her when she was a more normal weight. And this kind of thinness is most definitely not pre wedding nerves. This is a woman who is not eating. Probably because she is obsessed with her public image and how she appears in photos.

If you google pictures of Kate Middleton a very slim woman who looks great in clothes and compare her to Amal. Well Amal is a whole other level of thinness. Kate is still healthy and this woman isn't. The legs say it all! Amal's so thin her veins are popping out at the back of her legs. I can't see many men finding this attractive. No wonder George is drinking.

Well,I am new to this forum and this is my first message.But i am reading the posts for sometime now and i just have to say this. globalchick,i think you are not well.You should seek professional help.

Biset wrote:Well,I am new to this forum and this is my first message.But i am reading the posts for sometime now and i just have to say this. globalchick,i think you are not well.You should seek professional help.

Biset as you are "new" maybe you don't understand the thread. Which is to discuss the Greek trip and all it's aspects. Many posters are commenting on her outfits and appearance. I'm commenting on her thinness. All part of the discussion I'm afraid. Sorry if you don't like it.

Biset welcome. I just started following here late summer. I truly, truly appreciate your comments above. And Im laughing because you are so matter of fact. I have learned just either not to read globalchick's comments or if I do bite my tongue. There have been many on this forum, including myself, who have tried to reason with her. Ain't going to happen. And she is right. She is entitled to her opinions. But I don't understand her. And really don't understand her interest in George, given what seems to be her distain for him and his new wife.. But anyway, look forward to hearing from you.

Biset - Welcome!   New voices are always welcome on COH, so don't be afraid to post your thoughts. I'm sure you'll find many who share them - and some who don't - but that's what we're all about.

globalchick and I don't agree on much, but we do agree that Amal is way too thin. I'm hoping that now that she's secured her place in the world, she'll relax a little and eat something. Being that thin can't be healthy.

Welcome Biset. Enjoy your time visiting COH and do make your thoughts known on the various threads.

Amal is no where near as gaunt as Angelina. She looks fine to me thin but not too thin. They all all different women and know what they want to look like and how they feel their best .

Amal Clooney should back off. Lord Elgin was a hero who saved the marbles for the world


In February 2014, while promoting his World War Two film, The Monuments Men, Hollywood A-List actor George Clooney declared that Britain should send the Elgin Marbles back to Greece. Despite claiming they came from the Pantheon in Rome rather than the Parthenon in Athens (and also that they had been taken by Lord "Eljin"), he felt that returning them was now appropriate.
This was fiercely controversial territory. However, once the furore had died down, most people wrote it off as a kooky PR stunt.
Until last week, when it emerged that George Clooney’s new wife, Amal Clooney, a lawyer specialising in human rights law (but not as far as we know the law of museums or antiquities), declared she was advising the Greek government on the return of the marbles to Greece.
Speaking publicly to the media about the matter, Amal Clooney said that Greece had “just cause” to demand the return of the marbles, which she said had been taken illegally by Lord Elgin early in the 19th century, a fact Britain should be embarrassed about.
However, her assertion that Elgin took the marbles illegally is plain wrong, and flatly contradicts all serious histories of the marbles, as well as the reasoned findings of legal experts, and a parliamentary select committee which examined the matter in minute detail.
Furthermore, any art lover who has read up the real story will know that the collection of marbles in the British Museum simply would not exist today without Elgin because they were being systematically destroyed in Athens. If Elgin had not intervened, they would be a mere memory, like the Afghani Buddhas at Bamiyan, dynamited into oblivion by the Taliban in 2001.
The British case for ownership of the Elgin marbles is actually very simple. The sculptures were being destroyed in Athens. Elgin sought proper permission from the government in Athens to remove them. He did so with the full blessing of the Athenian authorities over a period of four years from 1801–1805. He funded the entire project himself, going bankrupt in the process. His only motivation was to save these unique works of art for the world, and he made not one penny from the whole operation, but died with his estate crippled by the resulting debt. When the British government purchased the marbles from him, they did so having satisfied themselves that Lord Elgin had acted properly in all regards.
And yet Geoffrey Robertson QC, head of Amal Clooney’s chambers and the senior lawyer on the team advising the Greek government, told the media last week that Elgin “was a bankrupt. He used his diplomatic position to get a license to take the marbles and to profit personally by selling them to the British Museum. If he did that today, he would be in prison”. I hope Robertson has now fired his researchers, because that portrayal of Elgin will not last two minutes in a court, although it no doubt goes down very well in certain newspapers and with those who do not want to be troubled by the facts. It is no wonder that opinion polls demonstrate a general wish to return the marbles to Athens when the debate is so often framed with such arrant and emotive inaccuracy.

Would Greece ever feel confident enough to challenge the British Museum in court rather than in the media?

The truth is that this is a non-story. The legal position on the Parthenon marbles is unambiguously clear, and no international lawyer who has looked into the matter would say anything else — the marbles belong to Britain. So far, no advocate for the return of the sculptures has taken the argument beyond insulting Lord Elgin to actually coming up with some relevant law. And there is a reason for that, because there is no law giving Greece a right to the Parthenon marbles — not even the 1970 Unesco convention on cultural objects or the 1995 UNIDROIT amendment to it. The legal position has been summed up succinctly by the world-leading cultural property expert, Prof John Henry Merryman of Stanford University, who concludes that the modern state of Greece has no legal, moral, or ethical case for the return of the marbles. This is why Greece has never brought a legal action for the sculptures. Instead, it wages an emotional political and media campaign, which amounts to no more than a suggestion that while the marbles may not legally belong to Greece, they belong in Greece.
It is worth starting the story at the beginning, before returning to the disingenuous historical distortions that plague the debate today.
Ancient Greek cities generally sited their municipal and religious buildings on the highest available ground, which was deemed the most fitting and mystical place for the gods to be honoured. It also made a lot of sense militarily. This area was the akropolis, meaning "the high city".
The city-state of Athens was sacred to Athena, and the people there worshipped her as the sacred Virgin (Parthenos), hence her great temple was the Parthenon (Παρθενών).
It was one of the world’s most magnificent buildings, conceived in the mid-400s BC by the statesman and general Perikles, plum in the middle of the city’s “Golden Age”. We also know that it was designed by the architects Iktinos and Kallikrates, who incorporated many traditional techniques such as subtly bending the immense columns to enhance the perspective of the temple from different viewpoints around the city, as well as taking their art to new heights in dozens of ways. Among the many wondrous buildings of the ancient world, it marks the undoubted high point of Doric architecture.
To complete the temple, Perikles called in Pheidias, one of history’s most gifted sculptors, commissioning him to fashion vast amounts of sculptural decoration out of local marble from nearby Mount Pentelikon to adorn the building’s exterior, as well as to create a massive gold and ivory chryselephantine statue of the Virgin Athena to go inside the temple.
The whole was completed in 438 BC — a fitting testament to the grandeur of Athens, with its nascent democracy (although not for women, foreigners, or slaves) and immortal philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; playwrights like Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Euripedes; and historians like Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon.

Moving forward over 2,000 years to 1799, what the British ambassador to Istanbul, Lord Elgin, saw in front of him on the craggy outcrop of the akropolis, which by then was an Ottoman military compound, was a sorry husk.
The fabric of all the buildings was decayed, and a ramshackle mosque huddled inside the Parthenon’s great pillars where once Athena’s vast statue had stood. Worse still, the Ottoman forces regularly amused themselves by hacking off arms or legs of Pheidias’s sculptures to sell to the tourists who had been coming in increasing numbers since around 1750. When not flogging the marble off, the Ottoman garrison fired rounds at the frieze for target practice, or simply ground the sculptures down to burn for lime they could sell.
Moving forward in time again, when Greece opened the New Acropolis Museum in June 2009, its director, Dimitris Pandermalis, called on the world’s dignitaries to campaign to bring the surviving sculptures back to Athens to redress what he described as Lord Elgin’s “act of barbarism”.
The truth could not be more violently different. And it is not a question of national or political perspective. The fact is that in the early 1800s the Parthenon sculptures were being actively obliterated, and it is only thanks to the extraordinary dedication of Lord Elgin that such an amazing collection of Pheidias’s unique, irreplaceable, world-class art has been preserved for people to see today.
Elgin was born Thomas Bruce in Fife in 1766. Aged five, he became the seventh earl of Elgin and eleventh earl of Kincardine. After education at Harrow and Westminster, and following university study at St Andrews and in Paris, he undertook a soldiering career in the 3rd Scots Guards, followed by a period as a representative Scottish peer. After a few diplomatic postings, in 1799, and aged only 33, he was sent as British ambassador to the “Sublime Porte” of Ottoman Istanbul.

Before he left, he made it known in London governmental circles that he intended to use his posting to commission drawings, paintings, and casts of classical art in order to bring them home, publish the drawings, exhibit the casts, and promote the advancement of the “Fine Arts”. He was an ardent art lover, and he wanted to make the wonders of classical art available to British artists in order to inspire and inform them. He asked the prime minister, William Pitt, if the government would fund this important work, but he was given short shrift.
Undeterred, he resolved to fund the educational venture personally. He therefore hired Lusieri, a Roman painter, two architects, two modellers, and a figure painter — and sent them all off to Athens. But when they got there, they found that not only were the local authorities wrecking the building, but the destruction had been going on for centuries.
The building had been through many changes. In the middle of the fifth century AD, Pheidias’s great statue of Athena had been carted away when the temple was converted into a Christian church (dedicated, naturally enough, to the Virgin). Then, following the Ottoman conquest of Athens in 1458, the building had been turned into a mosque, with a minaret added to the southwest corner. But the low point had come on the 26th of September 1687, when Venetian forces attacking the city struck the temple with a mortar shell, igniting a gunpowder magazine the Ottomans had idiotically been storing in the building, blowing out its centre and roof, and starting a blaze that took three days to extinguish.
Once in the East, Elgin soon made his way from Istanbul to Athens, where he saw for himself the distressing condition of the Parthenon sculptures. Alarmed, he immediately applied to the Ottoman authorities for a permit (known as a firman) to draw and cast the sculptures in order to save some vestige of them for posterity. His timing was good, as Britain was in strong favour with the Ottomans because British troops had just expelled the French from Ottoman Egypt.
Years later, in 1816, a select committee of Parliament drew up a report of exactly what happened when Elgin was in Athens. They heard evidence from eyewitnesses, and, after deliberation, concluded that Elgin had gone through all the proper channels and correctly obtained a firman allowing him access to the Parthenon to make casts and drawings. However, they also heard (and saw a translation) of a second firman granted to him, which went much further.
It was from the acting Grand Vizier (the Kaimakam), who was the omnipotent Sultan’s immediate deputy. It ordered the Civil Governor (the Voivode and the Chief Justice (the Cadi) to permit Elgin and his team to draw, mould, excavate, and remove any pieces of stone with inscriptions and figures.
Acutely aware of the ongoing threat to the remaining sculptures (over half had already been destroyed), Elgin did exactly what he had been granted such clear and explicit permission to do — he began rescuing the ancient artworks. There was no question of him and his men jemmying them off the building behind tarpaulins or under cover of dark. It was a fully public operation, and the witnesses before Parliament said that at no stage did any of the authorities in Athens or Istanbul take issue with Elgin’s actions, complain, or intervene. Dr Hunt, a British embassy chaplain in Athens at the time, stated specifically that:

… although the work of taking down and removing was going on for months, and even years, and was conducted in the most public manner, numbers of native labourers, to the amount of some hundreds, being frequently employed, not the least obstruction was ever interposed, nor the smallest uneasiness shown, after the granting of this second ferman.

Another eye-witness, Mr Hamilton, noted that, among the native Greek population:

… so far from exciting any unpleasant sensation, the people seemed to feel it as the means of bringing foreigners into their country, and of having money spent among them.

Some years later, when the French complained (perhaps because the efforts of Monsieur Choiseul Gouffier, French ambassador to the Porte, had been slightly less successful), the Ottoman authorities issued further firmans confirming that they had given Elgin full authority to remove and export the sculptures, and that he had acted at all times in accordance with all applicable laws.
Entirely at his own expense, Elgin rescued 247 feet of the 524-foot frieze, 17 figures from the pediments, 15 of the 92 metopes, as well as figures from the cella, inscriptions, and various architectural features. In all, he saved about half of the carvings from the Parthenon, as well as artworks from a variety of other buildings on the akropolis, all of which he openly transported back to England. Dramatically, one of the ships carrying the ancient monuments went down off Cape Matapan, but Elgin paid for the two-year salvage operation personally, and oversaw the retrieval of every single piece of the sunken sculpture.
In all this, Elgin’s motives shine out clearly from the written evidence and personal testimony. Although he had originally intended the drawings and casts he commissioned to be kept at his home (copies would be published or made publically available), once he had the firman to remove actual sculptures, he always intended the original marbles for the British Museum.
However, on heading home for Britain in 1803, Elgin and his family were captured by the French, who kept him prisoner for three years while Napoleon unsubtly suggested they might release him if he gave the Parthenon sculptures to the Louvre museum.
When Elgin finally returned to Britain in 1806 and exhibited the sculptures, they caused an overnight sensation, drawing the largest crowds the British Museum had ever seen. Elgin was hailed as a hero for saving the ancient art and for opening a window into classical Greece that captivated the nation, especially artists and writers, who had no idea such perfection had once existed on so grand a scale. Keats famously wrote a number of poems in praise of ancient Greece after seeing the marbles, and a generation of Victorian sculptors was electrified by them. Next year, the Tate in London will host an exhibition entitled “Sculpture Victorious” on the sculptures produced in Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901), and it will visibly demonstrate the enormous influence the arrival of the marbles had on the development of British art in the period.

However, while Elgin’s actions were largely celebrated, there were others who took a less rapturous view. In 1812, Lord Byron openly attacked Elgin:

Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
By British hands, which it had best behoved
To guard those relics ne'er to be restored.
Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved,
And once again thy hapless bosom gored,
And snatch'd thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!
(Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)

However, this needs to be put into context. Byron was a Romantic. As such, he did not want the marbles saved, preferring the idea of them slowly decaying in a tumbledown Athens, where they could be the focus of mournful poetry on the crumbling majesty of yesteryear.
Four years later, in 1816, once the UK parliamentary select committee had confirmed that Elgin had acquired the marbles entirely lawfully, it turned to the question of whether or not the art was important enough for the nation to buy it and house it in the British Museum.
The members listened to a wide range of experts, who unanimously declared the marbles to be spectacular, of the first order, and comparable with the Apollo Belvidere, the Laocoon, and the Torso of the Belvedere, all of which were thought to be the apogee of classical sculpture. The experts categorically confirmed that the marbles were “among the finest models, and the most exquisite monuments of antiquity”. In terms of what to do with them, the experts opined that they were “highly fit, and admirably adapted to form a school for study, to improve our national taste for the Fine Arts, and to diffuse a more perfect knowledge of them throughout this kingdom”.
In short, the parliamentary select committee concluded that Britain was immensely fortunate to have them as objects of artistic study. They exonerated Elgin of all slanderous claims of impropriety in obtaining the marbles, and concluded that “Lord Elgin is entitled to the gratitude of his Country.” They confirmed that Britain wanted to buy the marbles.
Parliament asked Elgin for his costs. Elgin submitted that he had spent £74,000 on the project — a colossal sum of money, a large amount of which was interest on the loans he had been obliged to take out to finance the venture. Parliament’s two experts then gave wildly differing estimates of the actual market value of the marbles, ranging from £60,800 down to £25,000. By way of comparison, Parliament looked to the £20,000 paid by the British Museum for the Townley Collection in 1805, the Ægina marbles which the Prince Royal of Bavaria had snapped up for £6,000, and the Phigalia marbles which the British Museum had recently been given at a cost of £19,000. In all the circumstances, the select committee concluded that the appropriate offer to make Elgin for the marbles was £35,000, along with a position as one of the trustees of the British Museum.
Although the offer was half what Elgin had spent, and left him owing immense debts (which plagued him to his death and burdened his heirs), he nevertheless had always intended the marbles to go to the British Museum, so accepted the offer, despite higher bids from others, including Napoleon.
Sadly, the facts of Elgin’s personal sacrifice to save the sculptures are not widely known among activists advocating repatriation to Greece. Instead, they assume Elgin looted them from some conquered territory in an imperialist spree of asset stripping. But nothing could be further from the truth. Britain and Ottoman Turkey were allies, and Elgin was granted full and lawful authority to take and export the marbles.
All manner of emotive and often ill-informed arguments now fly around concerning the rights and wrongs of who should own the sculptures today.
Perhaps the most widespread of all arguments is that the marbles are a unique national symbol of Greece and therefore innately belong there. But this is make-believe cultural nationalism. Modern Greece is not the same cultural entity as classical Athens, just as modern Egypt is not Pharaonic Egypt, and nor is Iran ancient Persia. Additionally, the Parthenon was only ever a building for Athenians. It was built to mark the Athenian victory over the Persians at Marathon, and was part temple, part treasure house for the tribute Athens collected from the Greek subjects of its empire. It was never sacred for all of Greece, unlike places such as Mount Olympus or the Oracle at Delphi. The marbles are breathtakingly spectacular Athenian work, but that is not the same as saying they somehow represent the whole of 21st-century Greece, or that the modern political entity of Greece is diminished without them.
Also, as a broader question, why do all the activists focus on the Elgin marbles alone? Large and small collections of sculpture from the Parthenon (and the wider akropolis area) are to be found in museums in Paris, Vienna, the Vatican, Munich, Würzburg, and Copenhagen. So why is the collection in the British Museum singled out for special anger?

More broadly, museums worldwide hold countless hundreds of thousands of artefacts originating from other countries. That is what museums do ­— they allow the public to learn about other cultures through their objects. In the largest “universal” museums, the exhibition experience even allows visitors to see artefacts in their widest temporal and geographical context alongside those of neighbouring cultures.
So what do activists really want? Where is all this heading? Should all museums give back everything that does not come from a randomly circumscribed geographic radius around each museum? Should the Louvre return the Mona Lisa to Florence, even though it was purchased lawfully by the French royal family? Should the J Paul Getty Museum in New York hand back all its Greek, Roman, medieval, and European art and sculpture, including many of the world’s most famous pieces? What about France returning the Bayeux Tapestry to England? Or Japanese museums sending back American rock memorabilia? Maybe Venice should give back the Horses of St Mark if we are now only allowed to see things where they were made?
These are facile arguments. Looting and criminality should be deplored and punished. But antiquities, like everything else, can be legitimately purchased or gifted, and we should celebrate museums that have quite properly acquired collections that educate and inform the visiting public.
Overarching this whole debate, the romantic notion that the marbles could simply be tacked back onto the Parthenon is deeply misguided. Even though Greece declared independence in 1832, the government left the remaining sculptures on the Parthenon to be destroyed by pollution and acid rain — and many were not taken down until 1993. Tragically, some still remain crumbling in situ. The result is that all the Greek ones that Lord Elgin left behind are damaged beyond recognition — blurry, fuzzy outlines like figures under a blanket, dissolved by Athens’s chronic pollution (although fortunately Elgin took plaster casts of many of the ones he did not bring to England, so at least we have a record of what they used to look like). Were the Elgin marbles to be returned to Athens, they would not go back up onto the Parthenon, but would simply sit in another museum, side by side with the wrecked Greek ones. There, in Athens, far fewer visitors would see them than in London, not only because of tourist numbers, but also because — unlike the British Museum — the New Acropolis Museum charges for entry.
Critics of Lord Elgin offer no evidence for their character assassination of him
The saturation coverage of Amal Clooney and Geoffrey Robertson QC’s visit to Greece last week clearly signals that the debate over the marbles is entering a new, media-focused phase. Those involved need to do far more research. As well as Robertson’s extraordinary statement that Elgin would today go to prison for what he did, he also said that the trustees of the British Museum were “philistines”, who keep the marbles “under bright lights, lit up as if they were corpses in a mortuary. Only 40 per cent are under the blue skies of Athens, where they can best be appreciated”. His researchers should have informed him that the marbles will never again — in any country — bask in the open under any kind of sky. They are fragile ancient artefacts, and it is only the care and attention shown to them by the British museum that has kept them away from pollution and in such amazing condition into the twenty-first century.
In conclusion, despite the character assassination of Lord Elgin by those who innocently (or otherwise) view him as some sort of imperialist asset-stripping fiend, it is clear that Elgin was a hero. He carefully sought permission for all his actions from the lawful rulers of Athens (who were not some Johnny-come-lately opportunistic occupiers, but had ruled Athens for approximately 350 years), and then bankrupted himself to save the sculptures and give them to the nation and the world.
Times have changed, and we care less for culture now than we did in Elgin’s day. But we should remind ourselves of what the priorities were then. For example, the 1816 Parliamentary select committee could not resist the temptation to add a little epilogue to their report — and it could, in many ways, stand as testimony to the spirit that drove Elgin to such a great project and personal sacrifice:

Your Committee cannot dismiss this interesting subject, without submitting to the attentive reflection of the House, how highly the cultivation of the Fine Arts has contributed to the reputation, character, and dignity of every Government by which they have been encouraged, and how intimately they are connected with the advancement of every thing valuable in science, literature, and philosophy.

However poetic that sounds, we now live in a different world. Art and culture are no longer vote winners. But it does leave one wondering why the Clooneys, with their ability to focus the entire world on any issue of their choosing, should plump for a legally nonsensical assault on the Parthenon sculptures when the world has need of help in so many areas where the Clooneys could sprinkle their stardust: the Middle East, Ebola, crippling G20 debt — the list of tricky problems needing solutions is not short. If they specifically want to focus on museum artefacts, why not highlight the help needed by the National Museum of Iraq, whose vast and priceless holding of some of mankind’s oldest art, literature, and science was looted and scattered in April 2003 during the US-led invasion?

If the Greek government is about to launch a new media PR campaign for the return of the marbles, it is time to put aside the wilful misinformation and cheap innuendo that masks the genuine debt that everyone — most especially Greece — owes to Lord Elgin. The world needs to stop whipping him, and start thanking him for his Herculean efforts, contra mundum, in saving these wonderful sculptures for everyone.

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Found on frenchies

Well, I'm certainly no legal expert or international anything, but it seems to me that it comes down to what kind of permissions were granted to Elgin in the original documents. There's a huge difference between being given or deeded something, and being allowed to become a caretaker or to have use of them.

I would think that the original documents would have to specifically say that the Greek government gave Elgin the marbles, or not. If he wasn't, then they weren't his to sell to anyone. If he was actually granted ownership (as opposed to conservatorship or custodial guardianship, or whatever the correct term is), then the marbles became his to do as he wished.

And if the UK authorities are holding on to the marbles by authority of the original permissions from the Greek government, they have recognized the Greeks as having domain over them at the time they were moved... and they could not now deny that authority if in fact the original permission didn't explicitly grant Elgin ownership.

But if the marbles were given away, and that fact is documented, then I don't see a case here. Not a legal one, at least.

So somebody tell me what point I'm missing.

Way2Old - I think part of the problem is that the Ottomans were an occupying force, and therefore the Greeks don't recognize their authority to give away/sell the marbles - even though they were in charge at the time.

Hmm. Okay, that's an interesting point.

In order to make this argument stick, they would have to not recognize the Ottomans' authority in other areas, too. Like, suppose the Ottomans did something that brought something to Greece from another country. Would Greece be ready to give it back?

Sevens wrote:

Katiedot wrote:Wow, a woman runs up to her and embraces her, thanking her for trying to bring the marbles back.  Amal just laughs it off.

Lucky this woman was thanking Amal because the security there was asleep!

Lucky it's a woman....if there's a random man coming up to her then trying to hug her...George must do something about this chaos upon his wife.

Great find!  I watched the video several times, watching different people's reactions.

 The funniest is her colleague (sorry I don't know his name) with the full head of white hair PUSHES the woman away with good force. 

And Amal in a confused state of panick, smiles and tucks her hair behind her hair a few times.

Much ado about nothing ... now what ?  Going to court ?

Atalante - It was only nothing because the woman meant her no harm. Had the person had different intentions Amal could have been seriously hurt, or worse. I know you think it's pretentious, but she does need security now.

the last paragraph is funny


The Elgin Marbles belong in Britain, Mrs Clooney

Had the ghastly Lord Elgin not plundered his works of art, they could have ended up in the footings of some Athens kebab stand

Mrs George Clooney has spoken. She expects the world to listen.

It is, she claims, “an injustice” that the British Museum has not sent the Elgin Marbles back to Greece. She is the latest in a long line of glamorous dressers – Melina Mercouri, Nana Mouskouri, Demis Roussos – to demand Britain surrender objects it owns.
Half the population of the world considers Mrs Clooney one of the luckiest women alive. She may not currently be in any danger of being whisked from dock-brief obscurity to the Supreme Court. But her bosses were canny enough to put up their most junior advocate as their spokesman, because they understood that she would garner a lot more column inches than they would. “Lawyer puts client’s case” is even less of a story than “cameramen film glamorous woman”.

So, earlier this month, while the snappers clicked, the Greek authorities took Mrs Clooney on a guided tour of the splendid new museum on which their country has lavished millions it does not have. It is, apparently, a terrific museum. Uniquely among museums, it is intended not just to show off what it possesses, but what it doesn’t possess. The most significant things that it does not possess are the Elgin Marbles – the beautiful classical statues by Phidias and his pupils that once adorned the Parthenon, were removed by an early 19th century British diplomat, and are now displayed in the British Museum.
Naturally – for she is being paid by the Greeks, after all – she told the press that they had, er, “just cause” for demanding that the statuary not in the museum should be returned to Athens.

It’s an attractive argument. Arrogant British nob plunders works of art, “vandalising” the ruins of one of the most beautiful buildings in the world in the process, ships them abroad and then flogs them to the British Museum. It’s enough to make any patriot’s blood boil. As for the British position that Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin, had bought the statues quite legally (they ended up in the British Museum when he sold them to try to avoid bankruptcy) – well, at the time, Greece was under Turkish occupation: the rulers of the day may have agreed the deal, but the Greek people didn’t.

But what would have happened to these sculptures had they stayed in Athens? After all, at the time Lord Elgin helped himself the Parthenon was being used as a fortress. Mary Beard’s excellent short history of the building tells us that for most of the 18th century, Athenians were in the habit of grinding down marble statues to produce lime and used parts of these great classical buildings as rubble for their foundations. Had the ghastly Lord Elgin not plundered his works of arts, they could have ended up in the footings of some kebab stand.

The modern argument is really political – a poor, put-upon Mediterranean culture is demanding restitution from a fading imperial power.

Though modern, independent Greece is a world away from ancient Athens, the country was once the home of Socrates, Plato, and other founders of western thought. Indeed, many a bewildered survivor of a chaotic, Greek-organised EU conference will tell you that a tenuous connection to this resonant philosophical culture must be the only reason the country ever got into the organisation.
We are told that the Parthenon is a celebration of democracy. Actually it was built as a temple to Athena and everyone conveniently forgets that the construction was only made possible by the wealth of the ancient Athenian empire, much of which was based on protection money.

In the following centuries it was used as both church and mosque and, in 1687, was serving as a Turkish gunpowder store when incoming Venetian cannon fire blew much of the place to pieces.
The political passions attached to the Parthenon are really the work not of Greeks but of Germans. On emerging from the Turkish yoke in 1833, Greece lighted upon the 17-year old son of King Ludwig of Bavaria as suitable human expression of its new-found independence. As King Otto, he and his German advisors tirelessly promoted the buildings on the Acropolis as the supreme expression of the Hellenic state. In scenes of mummery worthy of the producers of Strictly, Otto’s men annointed the Parthenon as the supreme emblem of their new country.

Who is to decide between this cause and the high-handedness of some clown who happened to have an ancestor who was once congenial to a British monarch? Earlier this year, one of Mrs Clooney’s allies – an American academic – claimed that “the Elgin Marbles, like fox-hunting, represent an overbearing past,” that Britain is growing out of. Perhaps so, but who is to say what might be the view when another 200 years have passed?

Surely, one hears Mrs Clooney argue, it is incontestable that it is nobler to reunite the broken creations of antiquity? Yet that is not what the Greeks are demanding. They call instead for the sculptures to be sent to Athens not to be restored to their place on the Acropolis – that would indeed be reunification – but to be displayed in a museum there rather than in London.

It’s a point of view. Maybe the Benin Bronzes really would perform a greater missionary function if they were on show in Nigeria than in London, Berlin, New York and elsewhere. After all, these Western exhibitions predate air travel.

But if we were to take the restitution argument at face value, the Venus de Milo – also removed from Greece during the Ottoman empire – would certainly have to leave the Louvre. The V&A would be packing up Tipu’s Tiger for shipment to Delhi. The magnificent Assyrian galleries at the British Museum would be on their way to Baghdad. And what on earth should happen to the great altar removed from the temple at Pergamon to Berlin? Pergamon is in Turkey, but was once part of imperial Greece, imperial Rome, imperial Persia and imperial Byzantium.

An adult understanding of history recognises that things always change and that all actions are the product of their time. Actually, I think Mrs Clooney’s suggestion of some sort of agreed swap, in which the British Museum lends the Elgin Marbles to Greece and Athens lends some of its classical treasures to London, is rather elegant. It is surely preferable to the absurd international Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, which is the alternative. Negotiations on which works of art were of comparable significance would anyway provide her firm with years of employment.
 
Of course, it wouldn’t satisfy those who argue that no artefact should ever leave the land of its birth. But then, by that formulation, we’d be digging George Clooney out of his new home in the Thames Valley and sending him back to Kentucky.

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LizzyNY wrote:Atalante - It was only nothing because the woman meant her no harm. Had the person had different intentions Amal could have been seriously hurt, or worse. I know you think it's pretentious, but she does need security now.

I was blabbing about the Elgin Marbles. What will she do now ???  Take the British Museum to court ? 

Telegraph managed to throw in another marble article in the middle of the wedding celebrations. 

Yes, the last paragraph is funny Nicky. But you missed the passage in the middle where they blame it on the Germans not the Greeks.

Yeah yeah...that's the thing with British and Germans ...... There are just jealous that we have better beer and won the World Cup.....The British are so sensitive but that's OK...... I'm sure we find something next time to blame them

British Museum Director


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British Museum director rejects Greek efforts to claim Elgin Marbles

British Museum director Neil MacGregor has issued a firm rebuff to renewed efforts by the Greeks to claim the Elgin Marbles.

Speaking today, he repeated the museum's long-held position that the acquisition of the famous sculptures by Lord Elgin at the start of the 19th century was legal and that there was "maximum public benefit" in them remaining in London where they were seen in the context of world culture.
Just under a third of the marble reliefs that once adorned the Parthenon temple and other buildings on the Acropolis in Athens are in London while about the same number remain in Greece.
"Quite a lot of them no longer exist. So there's no possibility of recovering an artistic entity and even less of putting them back in the ruined building from which they came," he said.
Yet the museum is coming under the most sustained attack for decades from the Greek government whose call for the works to be repatriated is now being fought by a team including the lawyers Geoffrey Robertson and Amal Clooney.
Her husband, George, said the marbles should probably go back when he was publicising his film, The Monuments Men.

And Unesco, the United Nations' cultural arm, has called on the British Museum to take part in "a mediation procedure"  to resolve the dispute.
But Mr MacGregor told The Times that his trustees "have always been ready for any discussions" but the Greek government would not recognise its them as the legal owners "so conversations are difficult".
The sculptures could not be lent while the Greeks laid legal claim but the Greek government was not interested in borrowing them anyway. "That's sad because these sculptures do belong to everyone. Letting them be seen in different places is important."
The works are officially owned not by the British government but the British Museum trustees who are charged with a legal duty that they give benefit to the public.

It was brought up in the wedding day hair thread by a poster that Amal's trip to Greece was a disaster and she misspoke in her speech. Said something incorrectly and then she said later that she didn't write the speech, insinuating that it wasn't her fault. Has anyone else heard about this? I haven't seen any media reports about it. Like to get clarification.

Nicky80 wrote:Yeah yeah...that's the thing with British and Germans ...... There are just jealous that we have better beer and won the World Cup.....The British are so sensitive but that's OK...... I'm sure we find something next time to blame them

LOL LOL LOL .....yes some Brits are very sensitive Nicky....
Think....towels on sun beds around the pool !

It's become a standing joke here.

Donnamarie wrote:It was brought up in the wedding day hair thread by a poster that Amal's trip to Greece was a disaster and she misspoke in her speech. Said something incorrectly and then she said later that she didn't write the speech, insinuating that it wasn't her fault.  Has anyone else heard about this?  I haven't seen any media reports about it.  Like to get clarification.

I read something on another forum from somebody "in the know" who was told that she misspoke about one of the statues and when someone asked her about it later, she supposedly said that she didn't write her speech, so she wasn't responsible.  There was no written documentation - just hearsay, so nothing to link to.  I call bullshit.

Bullshit. Now I understand. Thanks melbert.

Videos at bottom of news items I'm not sure we have:


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A remarkable number of column inches in today's Daily Mail for a 'quite likely' scenario:

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Oh, that is a pity. I liked the marble case. I was hoping that they would dig up old Elgin and hear what he had to say about it.

I was just wondering this week with the new change in the Greek government if that would affect this case in any way. I guess that's a real possibility. Especially if Doughty is charging high fees and the Greek government needs to reassess its financial priorities.

Problem apparently solved:

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British Parliamentary action on the subject:

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I hope they will be returned to Greece where, I believe, they rightfully belong. It doesn't make sense to me for them to be in different places when they should all be together. I'm sure it would be wonderful to see them all the way they should be displayed after all these years.