The Archaeological Museum in Palermo, Italy, lends a fragment of the Parthenon frieze of the Acropolis to Athens. This is how the German-speaking one reports Greece Newspaper and refers to a communication from the Greek Ministry of Culture. In return, an antique vase and a headless statue of the goddess Athene vase from the Acropolis Museum are going to Sicily.
For Greece this exchange is a political issue. Because Greece demands that the frieze of the Parthenon should actually be permanently in its place of origin. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had proposed such an exchange to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson: he wanted to swap a permanent loan from the “Elgin Marbles” of the Acropolis, which had been in the British Museum for more than 200 years, for other works of art from the Greek classical period. However, Great Britain refers to the formal legality of the acquisition by the London Museum in 1816, which under the 1963 law was not allowed to give away works of art.
The fragment now loaned is a fragment from a plate of the East Frieze of the Parthenon, a piece of the back of the head of a representation of Aphrodite. The other, relatively well-preserved part is in Athens and shows Poseidon, Apollo and Artemis. The loan period of two times four years is prescribed by Italy’s antiquities law. It has not yet been determined whether the loan can be extended or repeated.