Wrong Side of History

I took my daughter to Athens for a short holiday at half-term. She is studying Ancient Greek at GCSE, which makes me immensely proud as I didn’t even get that far with Latin.

Delphi was wondrous but Mycenae was perhaps the most powerful: there is something about the place, as if one might close one’s eyes, touch the stone and travel back to the Age of Heroes. It is also salutary to ponder that this was once the largest city in Europe, just as Uruk, home to the written word, is now rubble

Yet the Parthenon, even though I’ve been before and it’s as crowded as Thermopylae on a bad day, is still magical, both up close and from a distance. It’s beautiful when lit up in the evening, and every time you catch it out of the corner of your eye, you feel a bit grateful.

There is, however, something missing from the great structure, a topic which our Greek tour guide managed to only bring up five times, which I felt very restrained – the Elgin Marbles. The Greeks have been pushing to get them back for years and now they might be in luck, as Keir Starmer’s government is said to be open to allowing the British Museum to loan them to Greece.

Leave a Comment