Greece is prepared to part with some of its greatest treasures to "fill the void" at the British Museum if the Parthenon marbles are reassembled in Athens, the country's culture minister has said.
Speaking to the Guardian at the end of a fateful year for the campaign to return the fifth-century BC masterpieces, Lina Mendoni promised that the London institution's revered Greek galleries would never be empty.
"Our position is clear," she said. "If the sculptures are reassembled in Athens, Greece is prepared to organize rotating exhibitions of important antiquities to fill the void."
Asked if London had requested specific works, the minister, who is a classical archaeologist by training, insisted that ongoing discussions had not covered "specific artefacts".
But for the first time, she gave an indication of how far Athens was willing to go to compensate the British Museum for rejecting the sculptures, considered the pinnacle of classical art, by saying that any antiquities sent to the UK would also be attractive to the audience.
"They will fill the gap, maintain and continually renew the interest of international visitors in the Greek galleries of the British Museum," the culture secretary said, although he warned that "any agreement and all its details will have to be in accordance with Greek law for cultural heritage".
Since the cultural exchange idea was floated shortly after Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis' centre-right New Democracy party won power in 2019, there has been speculation that treasures, including the mask of Agamemnon - the golden burial mask described by some historians as the "Mona Lisa of prehistory".
In a significant change from the acrimony that dominated Europe's longest-running cultural dispute, the two sides began talking about a "partnership" that could offer a "win-win" solution to the dispute.
George Osborne, chairman of the British Museum, in response to Athens' drive to unify the marbles, seems more determined to tackle the problem than any of his predecessors.
He was the first chairman of the museum to publicly acknowledge the controversy surrounding the presence of antiquities in the British Museum. The museum bought them in 1816 from the bankrupt Lord Elgin, a former ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, who himself removed them from the Parthenon and elsewhere on the Acropolis in Athens using marble saws.
The former chancellor has hinted more than once this year that a compromise solution could be reached.
"We want to create a real partnership," Osborne told MPs on the culture, media and sport committee in October. One that would mean objects from Greece coming here, objects that potentially never left Greece and certainly had never been seen before, and objects from the Parthenon collection potentially traveling to Greece."
He vowed that talks aimed at securing a loan deal would continue, despite the diplomatic backlash that followed British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's refusal to meet Mitsotakis in November.
The British Museum's collection includes almost half of the Parthenon's 160-metre frieze depicting the procession to the temple at the Panathenaic festival in honor of the warrior goddess Athena, as well as 15 sculptural panels and 17 meticulous figures that were part of its unique decoration.
Mendoni, who has repeatedly stated that Greece cannot discuss taking possession of treasures that have been looted at all, added: "The Parthenon, a World Heritage monument, with its universal significance requires its integrity in the place where the sculptures were sculpted and for the reasons that created it."
She denied that the idea of creating a branch of the British Museum at the Acropolis museum, specially built to display the statues, was back on the agenda. "There was no such discussion," she said.
While Mitsotakis said progress was slower than he would have liked, many Greeks believe that at least the moral case for returning the marble has been won. A YouGov poll published in July showed that 64% of people in the UK now support repatriation.
Some commentators have interpreted King Charles' wearing of Greece's colors during his speech at the Cop28 climate summit this month as a statement of approval for the return of the marble to the country of his father's birth.
Asked whether Greece had ruled out taking legal action against the British Museum at a time when more and more controversial objects are being returned to their countries of origin, the Greek culture minister said the government would continue to "make full use of the opportunities offered by dialogue and cultural diplomacy".
Asked if she thought the British had not been told the truth about Elgin and the circumstances in which the marbles were acquired, she referred to Hugh Hammersley, a 19th-century MP, who in 1816 told the House of Commons that the decision for the British government to acquire the sculptures from the Scottish diplomat was an "act of waste".
But Mendoni also spoke of the positive mood behind Greece's great "national cause".
"Even people who for years opposed the return of the sculptures to Greece now support our request," she said. "If I wasn't an optimist, I wouldn't be working with fervor and faith for the national cause of reassembling the sculptures in the Acropolis Museum here in Athens"./BGNES
