In lucid prose detailing his affiliation with the “cause,” Johnson, then president of the Oxford Union, pleaded with the Greek culture minister, Melina Merkouri, to put the case for the return of the antiquities before the society, saying her involvement in discussion. “It would be an important step in your campaign.” “If the move is successful, and I am sure it will be, it would send a clear message to the British government that its policy is unacceptable to cultured people,” he wrote on March 10, 1986, inviting the actor-turned-politician to speak. the union in June of the same year. “I think the majority of students agree with me when I say that there is absolutely no reason why the Elginian marbles, by far the most important and beautiful treasures bequeathed to us by the ancient world, should not be immediately returned by the British Museum to their rights. home in Athens”. Johnson always recognized the importance for Greece of the sculptures considered as the high point of classical art. But over the next few years, his tune would change dramatically. Both as Mayor of London and as Prime Minister, he has reiterated the long-standing position of successive British governments that the antiquities were “lawfully purchased by Lord Elgin under the appropriate laws of the time”. Discovered in an Oxford library by Yiannis Andritsopoulos, the correspondent of the Greek newspaper Ta Nea in London, the letters not only highlight Johnson’s own reversal but also his role in launching a campaign that was in its nascent stages. The sculptures of the fifth century BC they were acquired by the British Museum in 1816, more than a decade after they were removed from the Acropolis in highly controversial circumstances by Lord Elgin, England’s ambassador to the Sublime Porte, the central government of the Ottoman Empire. Mercury first announced that Athens would formally request their repatriation at a global meeting of culture ministers convened by the UN heritage agency Unesco in 1982. At the time, he was looking for like-minded supporters in Britain. Last November, Johnson insisted it was a matter for British Museum trustees to resolve when his Greek counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, first raised the issue in Downing Street. Greek Culture Minister Melina Merkouri talks with Boris Johnson before addressing the Oxford Union in 1986. Photo: Reuters Photographer/Reuters The Museum has about half of the decorative works that once adorned the Parthenon temple. Mitsotakis, who has made the return of the treasures a top foreign policy priority, has often spoken of the artistic, cultural and aesthetic need to reunite “iconic monuments, inextricably linked to a nation’s identity” so they can be viewed in their entirety. them as a single whole. The Tory leader’s past zeal for restoring the marbles might have gone unnoticed had it not been for the discovery of an article he wrote 36 years ago in Debate, once the official journal of the Oxford Union Society. The essay, also discovered in the archives of an Oxford library by The News, also urged the British government to return the artworks to Greece.[then] a crumbling outpost of the Ottoman Empire.” Elgin, Johnson argued, had taken advantage of the “almost anarchy” of the nation’s vassal regime to “saw and hack” the treasures from the temple. Responding to the discovery, Downing Street officials insisted the polemic had been written by the then 21-year-old classics student in a fit of “momentary” rage. But the letters offer further evidence that Johnson’s initial attitude was far from transient. In a second dispatch to Mercury, also delivered in the Oxford Union notebook, he denounces the “sophistication and intransigence” of the British government. In an attempt to entice the famously flamboyant Greek woman to deliver the keynote address, Johnson also mentions her filmmaker husband, Jules Dassin, who “kindly took the time to see me” and says he will be among a list of other notables talk to the union. “Recent speakers at the Oxford Union have included Richard Nixon, Geraldine Ferraro, Helmut Schmidt, David Lang and Caspar Weinberger, so we are used to international figures,” he wrote. Mercury eventually accepted Johnson’s invitation to speak at the Oxford Union, drawing cheers as he urged the audience to understand the sculptures’ significance to the Greeks. “It is our pride. They are our sacrifices. It is our noblest symbol of excellence… it is our aspirations and our name. It is the essence of Greekness,” he declared. The chamber voted overwhelmingly in favor of returning the relics to Athens. “Mysteriously, however, the proceedings of the debate seem to have disappeared,” Andritsopoulos said. “I’ve searched high and low for them in the archives of various Oxford libraries, but I’ve got it. Who could benefit from their disappearance?’ In a third letter to the following press at the Greek embassy, Johnson spoke of the “great and splendid” party planned at the Oxford Union on the eve of the debate. “To get the thing going with a swing, we’re looking for cheap ouzo and retsina,” he wrote. “I was informed that it might be possible to obtain it through the embassy. Could you advise?’
