Scotland’s role in an Elgin Marbles mystery …

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Broomhall House in Fife, historic home of the Earls of Elgin

I AM standing within sight of Broomhall House in central Scotland on a bitterly cold day and marvelling at how this grey, slightly dour stately home has been at the centre of one of the most heated cultural debates of modern times.

This is the house built by Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, which he planned to adorn with his vast heist of Parthenon sculptures, and other antiquities that are now known as the Elgin Marbles. It amounted to some 220 tonnes and nearly half of what the Parthenon was decorated with up to the late 18th century, as well as other significant items from the Acropolis and other sites around Athens.

Broomhall House, near the village of Charlestown, Fife, is fenced off to the public, so you can’t get too close, yet even from a distance the house seems vast: a huge frontage, Grecian-style columns at the entrance, large windows, but Downton Abbey it is not!

And so I find it hard to fathom the aristocratic folly of Lord Elgin, or the hubris in wanting to hack apart some of Greece’s great cultural achievements, just to impart Grecian splendour to rural Scotland. The plan failed, as we know, yet the house has become home to some of  Lord Elgin’s antiquities at least. Though which ones exactly is still a bit of a mystery.

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Marjory in front of Broomhall House, the centre of a cultural debate

In the late 18th century, Lord Elgin was British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Greece at the time, where he got permission to remove some items from the Parthenon by using what is now considered to be a dodgy ‘firman’, official authorisation. In the end he took as much as he could, also by bribing workers on the Acropolis to help in the removal.

It was all bound for Broomhall House, and much of this was financed by his wealthy Scottish heiress wife, Mary Nisbet. What he mainly took was nearly half the frieze from the Parthenon, which depicts a religious procession, as well as some carved metopes from above the columns and 17 stunning life-sized statues from the gable ends, depicting scenes from Greek mythology. He also took a huge amount of objects, plundered from ancient Athenian burial sites and the graves of prestigious Athenians, and other Acropolis temples.

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Copy of the horse of Selene on the east pediment of the Parthenon

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The top of the Parthenon was once decorated with carved metopes, and sculptures on the gable ends

Lord Elgin arrived back in Britain in ill health, due to syphilis. He was about to be divorced by his wealthy wife, and he was also broke. He ended up having to sell the Marbles to the British Museum for £35,000, half what he wanted.

His justification for his heist was to preserve the items for posterity because the Acropolis by the 18th century had become a seedy garrison, with Turkish soldiers using the antiquities for target practice. Yet the Marbles, after being shipped from Athens, had a worse fate, being stored in a damp shed in central London for years and later said to be over-cleaned and bleached by over-zealous BM staff.

Greeks have been campaigning for years for the return of the Marbles, especially since the elite Acropolis Museum has a top floor gallery specially designed to house them in their original positions. There has also been a groundswell of international support, especially as celebrities come on board, like actor George Clooney, who made a recent plea on the subject while promoting his latest film about art theft, The Monuments Men.

And the collection of overlooked antiquities in Broomhall House would be welcome in Greece as well. These were items that Lord Elgin squirreled away here after the BM rejected them as too small, damaged or insignificant and are said to include some steles (grave markers) and pieces of sculpture. Not that you will ever see them because the house is not open to the public.

I rang the Edinburgh property management company that handles inquiries about the house, to request a comment from the current Elgin family about their collection of antiquities, and possibly as visit to the house. All the voicemail messages I left went unanswered. When I eventually tracked down a phone number for Broomhall House, I was told by a member of staff the family wouldn’t speak about the Marbles under any circumstances.

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The Earl of Elgin in his study during a rare  magazine interview        

A picture taken in 1998 (above) of the current Earl of Elgin (Andrew Bruce) in his study (courtesy of Freemasonry Today magazine), shows what is believed to be a carved stele and some other items mounted on the wall. Small pickings of course compared to what Elgin looted in the early 1800s, but for Greeks these are significant items.

One local man I spoke to in the nearby village of Limekilns, who asked not to be named, has been inside the house fairly recently, in a professional capacity, and told me there are many pieces lying about.

“They are all around the house, scattered informally like bits of the furniture, but they are quite striking. The Earl of Elgin will give you the history of the items, though I can’t claim to really know their significance. His attitude to them is very relaxed and open because he doesn’t feel he has anything to hide. What he will say is that he agrees with the 7th Lord Elgin in that they were brought to Britain for preservation and that’s what he’s been brought up to think. The Elgin family are very close to the (British) Royal Family and they just have a different way of looking at things,” he said.

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Nearby Limekilns village on the Firth of Forth

Tom Minogue is a crusading retiree from Dunfermline, who grew up near Broomhall House and has been researching and writing about the Marbles for a decade on his blog www.tomminogue.com which has a great deal of interesting material and a history of the Elgin Marbles.

He says: “I believe there could be a lot more of the original pieces inside the house, especially smaller pieces because there was so much material taken from Athens, like funerary urns and items taken from the graves of some of Athens’s greatest heroes.”

Certainly there are antiquities that appear to be unaccounted for. While researching this article, I came across an old library document dated 1810 with an inventory of Elgin’s “Museum” which his collection seems to have originally been called. This inventory predates the list of items presented at a Parliamentary debate in 1816 before the BM sale. Some items on the 1810 list are not in the later one, like a large sarcophagus from an Athens grave site. Also, there are some unique items on the 1816 list that are also unaccounted for, like three ancient cedar wood musical instruments, including a lute, taken from an Athens location. When I rang the BM I was told there was no record of them, or the sacrcophagus. Where are these things now?

Tom Minogue has felt so strongly about the Greek antiquities currently in Broomhall House that he took the unusual step of writing to the police in Fife and London in 2004 and again in 2009 requesting that they investigate the matter, but so far the police haven’t acted on his letters. You can read more about this on Tom’s  website.

There are those who would say it’s not fair to hold the current Earl of Elgin, who fought valiantly at the Normandy landing in 1944 and recently turned 90, responsible for the sins of his forebear. However, with increasing calls for reunification of the Parthenon art works, perhaps it’s the right time for someone else in the family to engage in the argument and at least exonerate Scots from this ‘heist’.

Tom Minogue says: “Scotland’s reputation has become a byword for imperial looting and it is hoped that with the restoration of the Parthenon Marbles, the reputation of Scotland as a compassionate and fair nation would also be restored.”

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A copy of part of the frieze from the original inside ‘cella’ of the Parthenon showing a religious procession

Certainly it’s a sentiment the great philhellene Lord Byron expressed in the early 19th century when he carved onto the side of the Acropolis the Latin for: “What the Goths have spared, the Scots have destroyed.”

Dr Nikolaos Chatziandreou is a Greek research scientist and cultural resource manager who also runs the very informative website www.AcropolisofAthens.gr. He spent several years studying at St Andrews University, Scotland, and is one of the main campaigners for the reunification of the Sculptures. He thinks that Scotland can play a catalytic role in this regard because the Scots can relate with the issue in yet another dimension.

He draws a poignant link between Scotland and Greece, between the historic struggle for the return of the Stone of Scone, once used for the coronation of Scottish monarchs, and the quest to reunite the pieces of the Acropolis to “restore conceptually the symbol of democracy”.

“The Acropolis sculptures are to the Greeks what the Stone of Scone is to the Scots. It is this strong historic, symbolic, emotional link between ourselves and pieces of heritage that help us define our life experience and sense of self […] Is it a coincidence the Stone of Scone is also called the Stone of Destiny? When it comes to the sculptures of the Acropolis, whose destiny should we see in them?” says Dr Chatziandreou.

The Scottish Stone of Destiny eventually went back home. What about the Marbles? I hope the guy at Limekilns isn’t right when he says the attitude of the Elgins was one of “finders, keepers”. The same could easily be said for the BM and the current British Government.

* To read a more detailed account of why the Scots are uniquely placed to lead the return of the Parthenon Sculptures, click this link http://www.acropolisofathens.gr/aoa/reuniting-the-sculptures/a-plea-for-support-from-the-scots/

For information about the new Acropolis Museum www.theacropolismuseum.gr

Books about living in Greece

For more details about my travel memoirs, Things Can Only Get Feta and Homer’s Where the Heart Is based on three years living in the Mani, southern Greece during the crisis, visit the ‘books’ page on my website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com

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Finding the real Zorba in the Mani …

 

Anthony Quinn as Zorba, with Alan Bates, dancing the sirtaki in the 1964 movie

 

APART from the Parthenon, Nana Mouskouri and blue-domed churches, what image or event totally captures the essence of Greece? For me, it’s the cinematic images of Zorba, played by Anthony Quinn, dancing the sirtaki on the beach to the Mikis Theodorakis’s theme tune – Zorba the Greek. The outrageous, lovably raffish Zorba is the enduring symbol of the nation’s spirit and stoicism. It’s no accident that during the international campaign earlier this year called We Are All Greeks, sympathisers world-wide took to city streets, linked arms and danced the sirtaki in support of Greece.

The character of Alexis Zorbas that Nikos Kazantzakis created 60 years ago in his book The Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas (translated into English as Zorba the Greek)  is more than just a literary concoction, however. The real man behind the character was every bit as spirited. Legendary tales about him are kept alive today in an unspoilt corner of the Mani region in the southern Peloponnese.

It was here that Cretan-born Kazantzakis hooked up with Yiorgis (George) Zorbas in 1917 for a peculiar and risky venture in lignite mining that was doomed to failure for many reasons but was nevertheless spun into literary gold a few decades later.

 

The original small white house at the end of Kalogria beach rented by George Zorbas from a local family

 

 

To find out more about the real Zorbas, we set off for the secluded beach of Kalogria, near the village of Stoupa, to meet a young woman called Mary Georgilea, whose family have been closely associated with the Zorbas family for several generations.

She took us to the small renovated house on the beach, built in the late 19th century by her great–grandfather Andreas Exarchouleas (pictured below) and rented out to George Zorbas when he first came to the Mani to be foreman of the Prastovas mine on a nearby hillside where Kazantzakis had become one of the partners in this venture. This was a time when the Greek government was offering incentives to mine lignite, a precious commodity in the war years.

The beach of Kalogria these days, out of season, is almost as deserted and peaceful as it was when the pair first came here in 1917. The small house with a red pitched roof is one of a pair built on the far right of the beach, not far from the well-known natural spring, the Prinkipa, that bubbles up cold mountain water between the rocks, like a natural plunge pool.

 

Mary Georgilea in front of Kalogria beach. Her great-grandfather Andreas Exarchouleas (below) rented out the white house to George Zorbas (bottom)

 

 

 

Kazantzakis had chosen to live on the other side of this quiet sandy cove from Zorbas in a simple hut made of wood and bamboo with nothing much inside but a table, chair and a straw-filled mattress. Yet it was here he spent much of 1917/18 writing and reading, leaving the gregarious Zorbas to deal with the lignite business, and village life.

Born in west Macedonia in 1867, Zorbas had worked in various countries as a miner before he came to the Mani, bringing his wife and some of their eight children with him, though they preferred to stay well away, living in the nearby city of Kalamata.

After working hours, Zorbas, then in his fifties, and Kazantzakis, in his thirties, regularly decamped to the shoreline of Kalogria with their supper – often cooked for them by a member of Andreas Exarchouleas’s family – for a long party session, either alone or with whoever had dropped by for the evening, over a few carafes of local wine, and Zorbas would play his bouzouki and sing. In real life, George Zorbas played the bouzouki, not the santouri, as in the book. The pair were famous locally for their rowdy beach soirees, in which they frequently danced along the shoreline, a fact that was immortalised in Kazantzakis’ book.

 

Stoupa beach, once a tiny fishing village, is now a popular tourist destination in the Mani

 

Mary, who lives in the nearby village of Stoupa and runs a villa rental business with her mother, was brought up hearing many outlandish stories about Zorbas from her grandfather, Yiorgos Exharchouleas, a well-known local resident. She says Zorbas was a unique character and faithfully captured in Kazantzakis’ book.

She also says that Zorbas and the writer more or less took over Kalogria beach in 1917 and scandalised and delighted Stoupa with their bohemian lifestyle. Stoupa in those days was a small, conservative fishing village with a few tavernas along the seashore and had seen nothing like this pair of outsiders, or their visiting friends – a  cast of exotic international characters who descended on Kalogria beach and included famous Greek actors, intellectuals and one of Kazantzakis’ best friends, the poet Angelos Sikelianos.

But while Kazantzakis was a more reclusive and complex character, the locals instantly took to Zorbas’ antics, his bouzouki playing, his kefi (high spirits). Kazantzakis, as in the book, was the total opposite of Zorbas, the cultivated aesthete compared to the rough and ready miner. It was the most unlikely of friendships, yet Kazantzakis has written many times of his admiration and brotherly love for Zorbas.

In another of his books, the autobiographical, Report to Greco, Kazantzakis explains what Zorbas meant to him.

“For he had just what a quill-driver needs for deliverance: the primordial glance which seizes its nourishment arrow-like from on high; the creative artlessness, renewed each morning, which enabled him to see all things constantly as though for the first time, and to bequeath virginity to the eternal quotidian elements of air, ocean fire, woman, and bread; the sureness of hand, freshness of heart, the gallant daring to tease his own soul, as if inside him he had a force superior to the soul…”

To complete the search for the real Zorbas, Maria took us to the abandoned Prastovas area on a Stoupa hillside which has the original lignite mine the pair were involved in. The mine proved unsuccessful and had an early demise and now it is a rather wild and forlorn rabbit warren of tunnels oozing puddles of spring water.

The work at the mine had been hard and dangerous with around 200 workers employed in 1917, some of whom later remarked that while Zorbas was always there working like a mule, Kazantzakis was rarely ever seen, even in the stone ‘office’, that is now a dilapidated old house. He preferred to keep a quiet vigil at the beach hut at Kalogria.

Some of the local Greeks we spoke to about the legendary George Zorbas lamented the disappearance of great characters like him and say the economic crisis has cut the Greek hero down to size. But if ever Greece needed another unique, maverick soul like Zorbas – it’s definitely right now.

 

Nikos Kazantzakis wrote in Report to Greco of his great admiration for the inimitable George Zorbas

 

Report to Greco by Nikos Kazantzakis (Faber and Faber) translated by PA Bien.

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For more details about my book, Things Can Only Get Feta based on three years living in the Mani, southern Greece during the crisis, visit my website www.bigfatgreekodyssey.com or visit Facebook www.facebook.com/ThingsCanOnlyGetFeta

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