Helena Handbasket

By Tivoli

Rooted

I've just heard Lord Vaizey speaking on Radio 4's “Front Row” about the potential benefits of returning the Parthenon sculptures to Greece.

Let me be absolutely clear here, those sculptures were stolen from Greece by Lord Elgin who bribed the Ottoman Pashas to let him remove some “boxes of rocks” from a hill in Athens. The Pashas couldn't have cared less about the temple and Elgin wished to return home an easy hero.
His contemporary, Lord Byron, could not have been more displeased, and was extremely vocal about it at the time. Byron also fought with the Greeks for their independence from the Ottoman Empire and you will still find streets and children named after him all over Greece.
One of the litany of pathetic arguments opposed to the British Museum returning the Parthenon sculptures to Greece is that the air quality in Athens might damage the marble sculptures. The truth of the matter is that historic inept restoration attempts by the British Museum of the sculptures, already badly damaged by Elgin's saboteurs, has caused far more damage to the artefacts than leaving them in their original positions could ever possibly have done.
Lord Vaizey argues that if we return their stuff they might be generous enough to let us borrow some of their other stuff.

Knossos perhaps?

I prefer my own argument, which is that Stonehenge is practically inaccessible in its current location on Salisbury Plain because of a busy road passing close by. It requires masses of security to keep it safe from vandals and ne're do wells, never mind the air pollution from all the traffic eating away at the surface of the stones.
Greece has the perfect location to re-site Stonehenge. The Lasithi Plateau on Crete is perfectly round, level and elevated, away from traffic and vandals, and conveniently close to Knossos, which is either the same age, or at least twice as old as Stonehenge, depending upon which archaeologist / anthropologist you choose to identify with, and is loads less likely to have cloud coverage at those all-important sunrises and sunsets on equinoxes and solstices.
Win-win!
Quick, let's do a swap now before the Greeks notice they've been robbed again.

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