THE BRITISH MUSEUM LOST AN OPPORTUNITY TO SHOW THAT IT, AT LEAST, HAS A HUMAN FACE...

Prime Minister Samaras described the Museum’s decision to allow the transfer of one of the artifacts from the collection of the Parthenon Marbles, on loan to the Hermitage Museum, as a provocative act against the Greek people.

The Greek PM has taken at heart the issue of what people here in Greece don’t like calling The Elgin Marbles.

It was his initiative to invite to invite to Athens legal specialists from London, amongst them the newly wedded Amal Alamudin, to prepare a legal case for the return of the Marbles, should all other political and diplomatic attempts fail.

The return of the Marbles is one of the very few issues that Greeks aren’t divided on, so one could conclude, I think, that Samaras’s angry reaction today could be seen as  a kind of comfort cushion for him in times of immense political and economical problems here at home, where his popularity has fallen significantly in the polls.

People are with him, on this.

And I think they have a point. They feel like a hurt child, complaining “why did you lend them to Russia and not to us at least, since you don’t want to give them back”.

They expected a good will gesture from the British Museum, and to me this is justified. The administration of the British Museum have lost a strategic advantage to offer this gesture firstly to the country where the marbles were their home. This could have been done when the magnificent new Acropolis Museum was inaugurated almost ten years ago, even without Greece asking for it.

If they do it now, it just won’t be the same.

I think the British Museum lost a good opportunity, and now its confrontation again. And actually at high level.