ΚΑΛΩΣ ΗΛΘΑΤΕ! Kalos ilthate! Welcome!
Welcome to the Global Greek World - a world of Greek-Somethings which stretches from Auckland to Zanzibar, from Aruba to Zimbabwe.
Wherever you are in the world, this is YOUR world!
They say that a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words...
It took two of our Global Greeks,Alexis Mantheakis and Ares Kalogeropoulos,both born and raised outside Greece,to get together and mastermind this marvellous series of pictures titled If Elgin was in... driving the point home much more emphatically than thousands of words ever could.
Direct and with impact, the reaction when we posted these pictures on our Facebook Page was instant and overwhelmingly positive!
....unfortunately, and we all know the disastrous results of Elgin's stay in Athens - the unprecedented destruction of the monument in order to rip the sculptures from their natural home and transport them to England.
However the sculptures have 'spoken', and their message is loud and clear...
Bravo Ares and Alexis! Messages like this inspire us...to spread the
word around
the world!
This campaign is one
of many especially aimed at the British Museum, which steadfastly
refuses to part with the sculptures ripped from their original home by
the not-so-noble Lord Elgin...
About the creators:
Ares Kalogeropoulos, one of our
Global Greeks living in Germany, is the creator of the I AM GREEK AND I WANT TO GO HOME movement, an independent movement for
repatriation of the magnificent statues and sculptures plundered in
days gone by and now
held 'hostage' in various museums around the world.
As Global Greek World, we are
pleased to be part of the IPSACI movement from the very first day,
supporting Greece's just demand for the return home of these unique
works of art pillaged by Elgin and which remain imprisoned at the
British Museum...
Parthenon Sculptures behind Bars at the British Museum
Photo Source: Alexis Mantheakis
The following is the text of the Open Letter to Mr David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, which was issued today by Mr Alexis Mantheakis, Chairman of the International Parthenon Sculptures Action Committee Inc
(NZ), requesting the repatriation of the Parthenon Sculptures. We are pleased to be part of the IPSACI movement from the very first day, supporting Greece's just demand for the return home of these unique works of art pillaged by Elgin and which remain imprisoned at the British Museum...
To The Rt. Honourable Mr. David Cameron
Dear Prime Minister,
Re - The Parthenon Sculptures Issue and the London Olympic Games
My country, Greece is currently suffering from one of the worst upheavals in its history, with its institutions and economy hanging in the balance and its people being subjected to unprecedented peacetime suffering and tensions for reasons every Greek citizen and politician knows. In the past we, of Greece, a small but inordinately proud nation, stood virtually alone at your side when Europe collapsed during the Second World War. Despite the terrible cost we would have to pay in lives and property we did not, as your allies, hesitate for a moment to stand up to the vastly numerically superior forces of Hitler and Mussolini, turning the tide of the war long enough to delay the deployment of German forces to attack on the Eastern front. The result was, as your eminent predecessor Sir Winston Churchill declared “If there had not been the virtue and courage of the Greeks, we do not know which the outcome of World War II would have been.”
In our present “darkest hour” it is our turn to ask for your support in a matter of prime historical, cultural and national importance for us - the unconditional return of the Parthenon Sculptures from the British Museum to their historic home in Athens.
Stephen Fry, your compatriot, recently wrote “The Hellenic Republic today is in heart-rending turmoil, a humiliating sovereign debt crisis has brought Greece to the brink of absolute ruin. This proud, beautiful nation for which Byron laid down his life is in a condition much like the one for which he mourned when they were under the Ottoman yoke in the early nineteenth century”
Prime Minister, history and future generations will honour you, as will Greece, if you take that one small - for Britain - but monumental, for Greece, step of amending the 1933 Museums Act to allow for the return of the Parthenon Sculptures.
The Olympic Games and the Parthenon Sculptures
The Parthenon Sculptures issue and the increasing and widespread dissatisfaction over Britain’s refusal to return the Sculptures will come to the forefront of media and public attention the closer we get to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, another Greek institution, in London this summer. The May 10th millennia-old ceremony of the lighting of the Olympic Flame at Ancient Olympia, initiating the torch’s journey to London, is already the subject of controversy because of the continuing possession of the Parthenon Sculptures by the British Museum and Britain’s obstinate, to date, refusal to return them to Greece. Thousands of supporters of social media sites are urging, among other actions, a “No Marbles, No Flame” activist stance. The Olympics, from Ancient times, have been a time of truce, not conflict. It is in the hands of all of us to continue this tradition by respecting each other’s cultures.
The repatriation cause is widely accepted as a culturally and academically noble one concerning a UNESCO-protected cultural monument. 220,000 of our members, part of an ocean of citizens supported by prominent officials, parliamentarians, heads of state and church, by eminent academics and prominent journalists, plus the majority of UK citizens and the European Parliament (in a motion passed with the support of your governing coalition partner Mr. Nick Clegg) request that honourable men and women in Britain do the honourable thing and return the mutilated statues and frieze sections of the Parthenon to their historic national home in Athens where they came from.
This plea would be of less value if I did not point out some fallacies that have helped keep the Parthenon Sculptures in The British Museum. Past British governments stated, erroneously, that their hands were tied since the British Museum was an independent body and that it is for their board of trustees to decide. The British Museum, irrespective of its status, has no legal power to “deaccession” antiquities removed from foreign countries. It has no gate receipt revenue and is dependent for its running and survival on your own Ministry of Culture and Sport funding. Its trustees are government appointees, or elected by trustees previously appointed by the PM or the Minister of Culture. One only is appointed by the Queen.
The reality -The British Museum is a totally government funded institution run by a government-appointed and controlled board of trustees. As such, and without any legal capacity whatsoever to return items in its care, the Parthenon issue can only be settled by a revision of the Museums Act by your government.
Even in it’s partially damaged present state the Parthenon is still an object of haunting beauty, a symbol of the birthplace of Democracy and an age of supreme freedom of thought, science, philosophy, art and civic organisation – the Golden Age of Greece. It is the defining symbol of western civilisation and has been the central symbol of the national, cultural and historical identity of Greeks for the last 2,500 years. Nobody except Greece can claim to have the legal or cultural right to possess parts of the looted monument
Possession of the Parthenon Sculptures by the British Museum is a throwback to an era of Victorian military annexations, officially sanctioned archaeological looting, legal opium trading and the institutionalised capture, transport and trade of human beings from Africa. Men of conscience and decent parliamentarians in Great Britain brought about legislation that introduced a new morality to end these abuses. By their actions they acted honourably, in the true interests of Britain, its people and of the world. The retention of the Parthenon Sculptures in Russel Square today is a cultural and moral anomaly: a historical throwback that brings no credit to Britain or to the British Museum, and we ask you to end it. The Olympic Games Opening Ceremony with its symbolism will be a fitting time to do this.
Stephen Fry wrote “How can we British be proud until we sit down with Greek politicians and arrange for the return of their treasure? It would be a dignified, but a thrilling celebration if the Prime Minister or his Deputy had the grace and guts to make this gesture, perhaps at the opening of London 2012 and then following it up in Athens with a full reinstallation, it will achieve many things.
What greater gesture could be made to Greece in its time of appalling financial distress? An act of friendship, atonement and an expression of faith in the future of the cradle of democracy would be so, well just so damned classy.”
Repatriation now will right a historical wrong and will honour those hundreds of thousands of my fellow countrymen who selflessly gave up their families and lives to be at your side when the Axis military tide was against you. We paid in blood to support Britain and its citizens, Prime Minister: for our country we now ask for a signature by you and your cabinet to return the Parthenon Sculptures to Athens where they belong.
If Britain could give back India, then surely the emptying of one room of a London museum is a small price to pay to right a historical wrong. It would also be a way to say thank you to those hundreds of thousands of Greeks who willingly traded their families and future for a simple cross in a dusty cemetery in order to stand by you in your own darkest hour.
Yours Sincerely, Alexis Mantheakis Chairman of the International Parthenon Sculptures Action Committee Inc (NZ) www.ipsaci.com
According to reports in the British and Greek Press today, Skorpios, the magnificent private island getaway in the Ionian Sea made famous by Greek Tycoon, Aristotle Onassis, has been put up for sale by the sole heir to his legend and legacy, Athena Onassis.
Skorpios, the island of legendary international jet set glamour, the island where Onassis stunned the world and especially Maria Callas, on October 30, 1968 when he married President John F Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, is also Onassis' final resting place along with that of his children, Alexander and Athena's mother, Christina.
Among those who have written about the rumored sale is writer Alexis Mantheakis, former press spokesman, adviser and friend to Athena's family. He writes in his Greek Political Issues blog that
Athina maintains Scorpios in pristine condition with an army of gardeners, servants, sailors and mechanics at a cost of around 1.5 million USD per annum, but never visits the island and is not known to have been to the family tombs there to light a candle or to say a prayer for her mother Christina, her uncle Alexander who died in a plane crash at 24, nor for her granddad who made her and Doda's present jet setting lifestyle possible.
Her mother and family rest quietly in the silence of the tiny island chapel of Panagitsa encased in milk-white Pendelian marble tombs. Only the weekly visits of a cleaning woman who comes to change the flowers in the chapel and to light a candle at each of the four tombs disturbs the serenity of the last Onassis resting site.
The cost of maintaining Scorpios, the reluctance of the heiress and her husband to visit Greece and the family island, and her past liquidation of hallmark Onassis properties and valuables indicates that it would only be a matter of time before Athina put Scorpios on the block. The Sunday Express report indicates that the time for this too may have come.
The last link of Athena (the correct spelling of her name) - Helene Roussel de Miranda Onassis to her Onassis heritage may be about to be severed. But there is always a twist in the Onassis legend. Athina is only 24 years old, very early in the game for anyone to predict the future of any of the Onassis women who historically have proved to be notoriously unpredictable. Time will tell, but Scorpios or no Scorpios, the last surviving descendant of the fabled dynasty may prove everybody wrong in the end. (To read entire article - click here)
We don't know if the rumours are true, as there have been many similar ones before, including one reported by the Daily Telegraph in May of 2004. We hope that it is not true and that Athena does not want to sever every bond that ties her to the Onassis legacy. We would like to think that she would be proud of her family and the legacy her grandfather and mother left.
However, it is her inheritance and if she feels that she will gain real happiness by getting rid of the Onassis Legacy Baggage as it were, and which she may consider as an oppressive burden, then who are we to stop her?
The legacy is hers and she can dispose of it as she wants. Athena has had enough tragedy in her young life. We in the Global Greek World can only wish her luck and happiness and hope that she can get on with her life in the way she wants to live it, far from the eyes of a voracious world press.
If the rumours do prove to be true this time, may we respectfully suggest to the Board of the Onassis Foundation that, the right thing to do would be to buy the island in order to set it up as an Onassis Family Memorial Museum, thus ensuring it's existence as an ongoing and living tribute to it's founder, Aristotle Onassis, the man to whom the Onassis Foundation owes it's very existence.
Statue of Aristotle Onassis at Nidri Port, Lefkada
This magnificent photo of Melina graces the Acropolis Metro Station in Athens and was taken by her personal photographer Ilias Anagnostopoulos
It is nearly three decades since Melina Mercouri, as Minister of Culture in Greece's first Socialist Government in 1981, brought the issue of the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles to the attention of the international community, giving the cause the international status it needed and succeeded in having them referred to as the Parthenon Marbles rather than the Elgin Marbles, in her glorious and inimitable fashion.
Melina's vision, which also became that of her partner, world renowned director Jules Dassin, was to see the Parthenon Marbles reunited in a Museum to be built in Athens just for that reason. Dassin's efforts continued after Melina's death in 1994, establishing the Melina Mercouri Foundation in Greece, to carry on Melina's work and keep the pressure on the British Government! Unfortunately neither Melina or Jules lived to see the opening of the New Acropolis Museum, but we are all here to continue Melina's campaign and keep sending out our message
There is no excuse anymore - Bring the Parthenon Marbles HOME!!!
On the eve of the opening of the New Acropolis Museum and among the first to visit Greece’s latest cultural jewel, devoted to the Parthenon and other temples, noted British born American writer Christopher Hitchens, took the opportunity of addressing the issue of the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles once again, and writes the following for the latest edition of Vanity Fair.
The Lovely Stones - by Christopher Hitchens for Vanity Fair July 2009
The great classicist A. W. Lawrence (illegitimate younger brother of the even more famously illegitimate T.E. “of Arabia”) once remarked of the Parthenon that it is “the one building in the world which may be assessed as absolutely right.” I was considering this thought the other day as I stood on top of the temple with Maria Ioannidou, the dedicated director of the Acropolis Restoration Service, and watched the workshop that lay below and around me. Everywhere there were craftsmen and -women, toiling to get the Parthenon and its sister temples ready for viewing by the public this summer. There was the occasional whine of a drill and groan of a crane, but otherwise this was the quietest construction site I have ever seen—or, rather, heard. Putting the rightest, or most right, building to rights means that the workers must use marble from a quarry in the same mountain as the original one, that they must employ old-fashioned chisels to carve, along with traditional brushes and twigs, and that they must study and replicate the ancient Lego-like marble joints with which the master builders of antiquity made it all fit miraculously together.
Don’t let me blast on too long about how absolutely heart-stopping the brilliance of these people was. But did you know, for example, that the Parthenon forms, if viewed from the sky, a perfect equilateral triangle with the Temple of Aphaea, on the island of Aegina, and the Temple of Poseidon, at CapeSounion? Did you appreciate that each column of the Parthenon makes a very slight inward incline, so that if projected upward into space they would eventually steeple themselves together at a symmetrical point in the empyrean? The “rightness” is located somewhere between the beauty of science and the science of beauty.
With me on my tour was Nick Papandreou, son and grandson of prime ministers and younger brother of the Socialist opposition leader, who reminded me that the famously fluted columns are made not of single marble shafts but of individually carved and shaped “drums,” many of them still lying around looking to be re-assembled. On his last visit, he found a graffito on the open face of one such. A certain Xanthias, probably from Thrace, had put his name there, not thinking it would ever be seen again once the next drum was joined on. Then it surfaced after nearly 2,500 years, to be briefly glimpsed (by men and women who still speak and write a version of Xanthias’s tongue) before being lost to view once more, this time for good. On the site, a nod of respect went down the years, from one proud Greek worker to another.
The original construction of the Parthenon involved what I call Periclean Keynesianism: the city needed to recover from a long and ill-fought war against Persia and needed also to give full employment (and a morale boost) to the talents of its citizens. Over tremendous conservative opposition, Pericles in or about the year 450 b.c. pushed through the Athenian Assembly a sort of stimulus package which proposed a labor-intensive reconstruction of what had been lost or damaged in the Second Persian War. As Plutarch phrases it in his Pericles:
The house-and-home contingent, no whit less than the sailors and sentinels and soldiers, might have a pretext for getting a beneficial share of the public wealth. The materials to be used were stone, bronze, ivory, gold, ebony and cypress-wood; the arts which should elaborate and work up these materials were those of carpenter, molder, bronze-smith, stone-cutter, dyer, veneerer in gold and ivory, painter, embroiderer, embosser, to say nothing of the forwarders and furnishers of the material It came to pass that for every age almost, and every capacity, the city’s great abundance was distributed and shared by such demands.
When we think of Athens in the fifth century b.c., we think chiefly of the theater of Euripides and Sophocles and of philosophy and politics—specifically democratic politics, of the sort that saw Pericles repeatedly re-elected in spite of complaints that he was overspending. And it’s true that Antigone was first performed as the Parthenon was rising, and Medea not all that long after the temple was finished. From drama to philosophy: Socrates himself was also a stonemason and sculptor, and it seems quite possible that he too took part in raising the edifice. So Greece might have something to teach us about the arts of recovery as well. As the author of The Stones of Athens, R. E. Wycherley, puts it:
In some sense, the Parthenon must have been the work of a committee It was the work of the whole Athenian people, not merely because hundreds of them had a hand in building it, but because the assembly was ultimately responsible, confirmed appointments, and sanctioned and scrutinized the expenditure of every drachma.
I have visited many of the other great monuments of antiquity, from Luxor and Karnak and the pyramids to Babylon and Great Zimbabwe, and their magnificence is always compromised by the realization that slaves did the heavy lifting and they were erected to show who was boss. The Parthenon is unique because, though ancient Greece did have slavery to some extent, its masterpiece also represents the willing collective work of free people. And it is open to the light and to the air: “accessible,” if you like, rather than dominating. So that to its rightness you could tentatively add the concept of “rights,” as Periclean Greeks began dimly to formulate them for the first time.
Not that the beauty and symmetry of the Parthenon have not been abused and perverted and mutilated. Five centuries after the birth of Christianity the Parthenon was closed and desolated. It was then “converted” into a Christian church, before being transformed a thousand years later into a mosque—complete with minaret at the southwest corner—after the Turkish conquest of the Byzantine Empire. Turkish forces also used it for centuries as a garrison and an arsenal, with the tragic result that in 1687, when Christian Venice attacked the Ottoman Turks, a powder magazine was detonated and huge damage inflicted on the structure. Most horrible of all, perhaps, the Acropolis was made to fly a Nazi flag during the German occupation of Athens. I once had the privilege of shaking the hand of Manolis Glezos, the man who climbed up and tore the swastika down, thus giving the signal for a Greek revolt against Hitler.
The damage done by the ages to the building, and by past empires and occupations, cannot all be put right. But there is one desecration and dilapidation that can at least be partially undone. Early in the 19th century, Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin, sent a wrecking crew to the Turkish-occupied territory of Greece, where it sawed off approximately half of the adornment of the Parthenon and carried it away. As with all things Greek, there were three elements to this, the most lavish and beautiful sculptural treasury in human history. Under the direction of the artistic genius Phidias, the temple had two massive pediments decorated with the figures of Pallas Athena, Poseidon, and the gods of the sun and the moon. It then had a series of 92 high-relief panels, or metopes, depicting a succession of mythical and historical battles. The most intricate element was the frieze, carved in bas-relief, which showed the gods, humans, and animals that made up the annual Pan-Athens procession: there were 192 equestrian warriors and auxiliaries featured, which happens to be the exact number of the city’s heroes who fell at the Battle of Marathon. Experts differ on precisely what story is being told here, but the frieze was quite clearly carved as a continuous narrative. Except that half the cast of the tale is still in Bloomsbury, in London, having been sold well below cost by Elgin to the British government in 1816 for $2.2 million in today’s currency to pay off his many debts. (His original scheme had been to use the sculptures to decorate Broomhall, his rain-sodden ancestral home in Scotland, in which case they might never have been seen again.)
Ever since Lord Byron wrote his excoriating attacks on Elgin’s colonial looting, first in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) and then in The Curse of Minerva (1815), there has been a bitter argument about the legitimacy of the BritishMuseum’s deal. I’ve written a whole book about this controversy and won’t oppress you with all the details, but would just make this one point. If the Mona Lisa had been sawed in two during the Napoleonic Wars and the separated halves had been acquired by different museums in, say, St. Petersburg and Lisbon, would there not be a general wish to see what they might look like if re-united? If you think my analogy is overdrawn, consider this: the body of the goddess Iris is at present in London, while her head is in Athens. The front part of the torso of Poseidon is in London, and the rear part is in Athens. And so on. This is grotesque.
To that essentially aesthetic objection the British establishment has made three replies. The first is, or was, that return of the marbles might set a “precedent” that would empty the world’s museum collections. The second is that more people can see the marbles in London. The third is that the Greeks have nowhere to put or display them. The first is easily disposed of: The Greeks don’t want anything else returned to them and indeed hope to have more, rather than less, Greek sculpture displayed in other countries. And there is in existence no court or authority to which appeals on precedent can be made. (Anyway, who exactly would be making such an appeal? The Aztecs? The Babylonians? The Hittites? Greece’s case is a one-off—quite individual and unique.) As to the second: Melina Mercouri’s husband, the late movie director and screenwriter Jules Dassin, told a British parliamentary committee in 2000 that by the standard of mass viewership the sculptures should all be removed from Athens and London and exhibited in Beijing. After these frivolous and boring objections have been dealt with, we are left with the third and serious one, which is what has brought me back to Athens. Where should the treasures be safeguarded and shown?
It is unfortunately true that the city allowed itself to become very dirty and polluted in the 20th century, and as a result the remaining sculptures and statues on the Parthenon were nastily eroded by “acid rain.” And it’s also true that the museum built on the Acropolis in the 19th century, a trifling place of a mere 1,450 square meters, was pathetically unsuited to the task of housing or displaying the work of Phidias. But gradually and now impressively, the Greeks have been living up to their responsibilities. Beginning in 1992, the endangered marbles were removed from the temple, given careful cleaning with ultraviolet and infra-red lasers, and placed in a climate-controlled interior. Alas, they can never all be repositioned on the Parthenon itself, because, though the atmospheric pollution is now better controlled, Lord Elgin’s goons succeeded in smashing many of the entablatures that held the sculptures in place. That leaves us with the next-best thing, which turns out to be rather better than one had hoped.
About a thousand feet southeast of the temple, the astonishing new AcropolisMuseum will open on June 20. With 10 times the space of the old repository, it will be able to display all the marvels that go with the temples on top of the hill. Most important, it will be able to show, for the first time in centuries, how the Parthenon sculptures looked to the citizens of old.
Arriving excitedly for my preview of the galleries, I was at once able to see what had taken the Greeks so long. As with everywhere else in Athens, if you turn over a spade or unleash a drill you uncover at least one layer of a previous civilization. (Building a metro for the Olympics in 2004 was a protracted if fascinating nightmare for this very reason.) The new museum, built to the design of the French-Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, has had to be mounted above ground on 100 huge reinforced-concrete pillars, which allow you to survey the remnants of villas, drains, bathhouses, and mosaics of the recently unearthed neighborhood below. Much of the ground floor is made of glass so that natural light filters down to these excavations and gives the effect of transparency throughout. But don’t look down for too long. Raise your eyes and you will be given an arresting view of the Parthenon, from a building that has been carefully aligned to share its scale and perspective with the mother ship.
I was impatient to be the first author to see the remounted figures and panels and friezes. Professor Dimitrios Pandermalis, the head of the museum, took me to the top-floor gallery and showed me the concentric arrangement whereby the sculpture of the pediment is nearest the windows, the high-relief metopes are arranged above head height (they are supposed to be seen from below), and finally the frieze is running at eye level along the innermost wall. At any time, you can turn your head to look up and across at the architectural context for which the originals were so passionately carved. At last it will be possible to see the building and its main artifacts in one place and on one day.
The British may continue in their constipated fashion to cling to what they have so crudely amputated, but the other museums and galleries of Europe have seen the artistic point of re-unification and restored to Athens what was looted in the years when Greece was defenseless. Professor Pandermalis proudly showed me an exquisite marble head, of a youth shouldering a tray, that fits beautifully into panel No. 5 of the north frieze. It comes courtesy of the collection of the Vatican. Then there is the sculpted foot of the goddess Artemis, from the frieze that depicts the assembly of Olympian gods, by courtesy of the SalinasMuseum, in Palermo. From Heidelberg comes another foot, this time of a young man playing a lyre, and it fits in nicely with the missing part on panel No. 8. Perhaps these acts of cultural generosity, and tributes to artistic wholeness, could “set a precedent,” too?
The AcropolisMuseum has hit on the happy idea of exhibiting, for as long as following that precedent is too much to hope for, its own original sculptures with the London-held pieces represented by beautifully copied casts. This has two effects: It allows the visitor to follow the frieze round the four walls of a core “cella” and see the sculpted tale unfold (there, you suddenly notice, is the “lowing heifer” from Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn). And it creates a natural thirst to see the actual re-assembly completed. So, far from emptying or weakening a museum, this controversy has instead created another one, which is destined to be among Europe’s finest galleries. And one day, surely, there will be an agreement to do the right thing by the world’s most “right” structure.
We at Global Greek World certainly hope so, Christopher, and thank you for all the support you have given our Global Greek Cause!
To read the original article in Vanity Fair, Click here
To see a slide show of the New Acropolis Museum by the New York Times, Click here
To visit the website of the New Acropolis Museum, Click here
Recently a new initiative for the Repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles has started up, gathering more than 100,000 members on Facebook! To read about this Campaign, headed by Alexis Mantheakis Click here
To buy a copy of Christopher Hitchens' Book "The Elgin Marbles, Should they be Returned to Greece?" Click here
One of our Global Greeks, Greek Cypriot and British entrepreneur Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and known for his easyGroup of Companies, this time last year sent out an open letter to all parties concerned in the debate on the Parthenon Sculptures or Parthenon Marbles, as they are more widely known. The letter was published in many British newspapers calling on the curators of the British Museum and the New Acropolis Museum, to convene and discuss the matter of the repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles.
Refusing to get drawn into the question of legal ownership of the Sculptures, Stelios asked the two parties to engage in a constructive dialogue on the Parthenon Sculptures and their reunification. Stelios’ enterprises have been actively involved in this campaign. EasyGroup has also sponsored a debate which was held by the Cambridge Union Society on the motion of the return of the Parthenon marbles to the New Acropolis Museum. That debate was won by the repatriation supporters.
Stelios, as he likes to be called, headed his open letter as follows:
I JUST WANT THE TWO GUYS TO TALK TO EACH OTHER
Open letter from Stelios, Chairman of easyCruise.com
To: The British Museum, London, UK
The New AcropolisMuseum, Athens, Greece
Re: The Parthenon Marbles
June 2008
Dear Sirs,
I've taken the liberty to write this open letter as someone almost uniquely positioned between the Greek and the British cultures, having spent most of my adult life 'flying' between the two capitals. I think the time has come for the curators of the two museums to have a constructive dialogue about the Parthenon marbles.
Away from politics and name calling, I feel there is now a win-win solution for both museums in the form of a cultural exchange. Therefore, art lovers worldwide might get the once in a lifetime chance to see these masterpieces reunited.
This is why I decided to paint 'Reunite the Parthenon marbles' on the side of our latest cruise ship.
Yours faithfully
Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou
Bravo Stelio!
We don't know if there was any positive response to the letter, but if we judge from the lack of any tangible results and the continuing refusal of the British Museum Trustees to give an inch, as well as their absence from the Official Opening of the New Acropolis Museum on Saturday, well, it speaks for itself! We do however applaud the initiative taken by this very Global Greek and hope that more of us take other such initiatives for the benefit of Hellenism and our Global Greek World!
About Stelios
Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou – who prefers to be known as Stelios, a Serial Entrepreneur - is best known for creating easyJet in 1995, at the age of 28. In 2000, he floated - on the London Stock Exchange - the low-cost airline that revolutionized European air travel. Nowadays, the company has grown into one of Europe’s leading airlines with some 170 aircraft flying over 400 routes between 103 airports in 26 countries. Approximately 45 million people a year fly with easyJet enjoying more value for less!
Stelios is the son of a very successful Greek shipowner, the late Loucas Haji-Ioannou, who provided the seed capital for Stelios’ independent business career, which started when he created a shipping company - Stelmar - at the age of 25. Subsequently, Stelios floated Stelmar on the New York Stock Exchange in 2001; the company was successfully sold to a rival in 2005, creating significant shareholder value.
Today, Stelios remains the biggest single shareholder of easyJet PLC and a non-executive director. In parallel, before the IPO in 2000 - and true to his beliefs in serial entrepreneurship - he consolidated the ownership of the easy brand into his private company, easyGroup, and launched several easy-branded businesses. The group currently includes easyCar (car rental), easyHotel (budget hotels), easyBus (airport transfers), easyOffice (low-cost, serviced office rental for small businesses), easyPizza and easyCruise - all dedicated to offering more value for less to millions of consumers.
In 2006, at the age of 39, Stelios received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for services to entrepreneurship. Since then, Sir Stelios has expanded his dedication to making a difference to society by launching a number of philanthropic initiatives supporting entrepreneurship, higher education and environmental sustainability.
Stelios has pledged 200 scholarships over 10 years to the London School of Economics and Cass Business School in London - his almae mater - supporting young, exceptional scholars who want to make a difference in their chosen fields. Similarly - in partnership with Leonard Cheshire Disability in the UK - Stelios created the "Disabled Entrepreneur of the Year" award given to exceptional entrepreneurs who have overcome significant physical and perceptual limitations in starting their businesses. (www.lcdisability.org/stelios).
In Cyprus, the birthplace of his parents, Stelios co-founded CYMEPA in 1992 (www.cymepa.org) - an association dedicated to preserving the marine environment. In his own birthplace, Greece, he continues his commitment to environmental protection by supporting the Pendeli Reforestation project. Additionally, in Greece, Stelios strives to further inspire entrepreneurship through the Kouros award, a 50,000EU prize given to the outstanding business start-up of the year. Building on his many years of support for the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), Stelios has recently been appointed to the Council of Ambassadors of the WWF-UK.
More likely to be on an aircraft than in an office, Stelios is 42 years old and lives in Monaco.
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 snatched thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!
Lord Byron on the Parthenon Marbles from his epic 'Childe Harold'
With this particularly appropriate quote from his epic poem 'Childe Harold', wherein one of the greatest Philhellenes ever, Lord Byron, reproaches his countrymen, the British, for their pillaging of the Parthenon Marbles while they were supposed to be protecting them, Alexis Mantheakis introduces us to his pilgrimage for the Repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles.
Judging that it is now time for action since all Greece's efforts using diplomacy and tact appear to have been largely ignored by the British, and with his finger on the pulse of technology, Alexis has moved dynamically and with vision. He has created a movement for action, a cause, on the social networking site, Facebook, with the intention of intensifying the pressure on the BritishMuseum and the British Government, for the Repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles, in view of the upcoming Olympic Games to be held in London in 2012.
This cause has gained tremendous momentum since it started on Facebook a short time ago, already numbering more than 50 000 members and growing daily!
For those not on Facebook, the site you can visit to read more is
Political analyst and former press spokesman for Athena Onassis-Roussel and her family, Alexis Mantheakis is one of our Global Greek writers, a Greek-Something born in East Africa of Greek parents, and now lives in Greece. To find out more about Alexis and his work, visit his blog - Greek Political Issues.
Ares Kalogeropoulos, one of our
Global Greeks living in Germany, is the creator of the I AM GREEK AND I WANT TO GO HOME movement, an independent movement for
repatriation of the magnificent statues and sculptures plundered in
days gone by and now
held 'hostage' in various museums around the world. 
