British Elementary College College students Request For Parthenon Sculptures To Return To Greece
A team of 10-yr-outdated college students from the 5th Elementary School of Our Woman of Sion in West Sussex, England, despatched open up letters to the Greek ambassador to London, Ioannis Raptakis, asking for the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum to be returned to Greece.
Mr. Raptakis has been a potent supporter of the return of the Parthenon Sculptures to their motherland, Greece, specifically after Brexit, with the depart of the Uk from the European Union.
He exclusively said that he was “pleasantly surprised” when he opened his correspondence this 7 days, in his office environment in Holland Park, and observed letters from elementary college college students, expressing their heartfelt guidance for him and his campaign for the Parthenon Sculptures.
Without prior get hold of with the embassy, the pupils at the Our Girl of Sion College mentioned the difficulty in their class and decided to clearly show their support to Greece by stating that “the Greek sculptures really should not continue to be imprisoned in the British Museum in England.”
10-yr-old Rose, a college student from Wringing, a seaside city in West Sussex, 79 km south of London, wrote in her letter to the Greek ambassador: “I am Rose, I am 10 decades aged and I wholly agree that the Parthenon Sculptures need to dwell in Greece. Marbles ought to not be in England, they need to be in the Greek museum, simply because it is part of Greek lifestyle and it is like stealing a section of your Greek earlier! I think that Lord Elgin did not take the Marbles of the Parthenon legally.”
“The English safeguarded the Parthenon Sculptures for sufficient time,” Rose additional.
“I vote in favour of sending the Parthenon Sculptures back to Greece. The Parthenon was manufactured for the Goddess Athena. Your ancestors built it many centuries back and the Greeks have the right to just take back the sculptures. A further cause is that I do not assume that the Turkish had the ideal to give Lord Elgin the sculptures even although they dominated Greece at that time. What would occur if the Greeks took a piece of Big Ben or from our Parliament?” 10-calendar year-outdated Miya wrote in her letter.
“I imagine we must give back again the Parthenon Sculptures to Greece mainly because they designed a beautiful historic making and are entitled to the sculptures back. I believe there is no piece of paper stating Lord Elgin could take them. We would not like it if the Greeks took Elizabeth Tower and would not give it again! We can’t acquire factors from other nations that we do not own,” student Daisy wrote to the Greek ambassador.
It has been 204 a long time considering that Lord Elgin, Britain’s ambassador to the Substantial Gate, marketed the sculptures and sculptures he extracted from the Parthenon temple to the House of Commons in England.
Elgin, who at the time was planning his mansion in Scotland, was on the lookout for historic Greek sculptures and artefacts to decorate his house, and executed excavations in Greece. After negotiations with the Turks, he taken off 50% of Parthenon’s sculptures, whilst detrimental the the vast majority of them.
The questionable legitimacy – and according to lots of, vandalism – of this intense removal of the Parthenon friezes from the Acropolis, was first of all talked over by a British Member of the Parliament, Hugh Hammersley, who called for the return of the “Elgin Marbles” to Greece back in 1816.
Afterwards, in the 1980s, when Greek Minister of Lifestyle, Melina Mercouri, initiated the world wide marketing campaign Intercontinental Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures and began the to start with motion for the return of the Parthenon Sculptures.
Given that then, the reunification phone has been backed by international figures, this sort of as Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Stephen Fry, Sean Connery, and George and Amal Clooney.
Additionally, more than the several years, polls from the BBC, Sky Information, The Telegraph, The Guardian and quite a few additional British media stores, have demonstrated that the greater part of the British general public has constantly sided with Greece and with the return of the Greek sculptures to the Parthenon.
This time, amongst the British supporters ended up the Our Girl of Sion Faculty youngsters, who sent a lot of letters to the Greek embassy as section of a faculty dialogue with subject matter “Let’s consider the sculptures back to Greece!”
Edith Corridor, a foremost scholar of historical Greek lifestyle and scientific tests, professor at King’s College or university in London, and a member of the British Committee for the Reunification of Parthenon Sculptures, mentioned that: “As a person who visits educational facilities in Britain on a weekly basis to speak to pupils about the wonders of historical Greece, I’m incredibly happy to understand that the youthful generation is so enthusiastic about reuniting the Parthenon Sculptures with the Parthenon. It offers me hope that when these young children mature up, they will last but not least be able to accomplish what should really have been carried out additional than 200 decades in the past.”
The Greek ambassador, Ioannis Raptakis, who took office in London in Oct 2020, also explained that: “It is moving that small children educated in the British education and learning method understand both equally Elgin’s indecency and the tolerance of the Turks, as nicely as the British obsession to illegally withhold elements of a monument of Greek lifestyle.”
“As extended as there are this sort of voices, there is hope that at some issue, the voices of the marbles that are considerably from the place in which they belong, will be listened to and they will return to reconnect with the monument in Greece.”
“These small children fill us with delight and affirm the universal values of Greek society and legislation,” he extra.
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