Museum

I spent a poirtion of the day in the British Museum.

There is a very good exhibit on Hadrian (and we must forget Sabina!). I enjoyed the controversial “marbles”.

Now it is off to other adventures!

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
This entry was posted in SESSIUNCULA. Bookmark the permalink.

4 Comments

  1. Rachel says:

    What’s controversial about the marbles? Thanks for the pictures!

  2. PMcGrath says:

    The “marbles” in question are the Elgin Marbles. They were pinched from the Parthenon of Athens by Lord Elgin, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the early 1800s, when the Turks still occupied Athens and all of Greece. The Greeks want them back something fierce.

  3. anamericanmother says:

    You can hardly call it “pinched” when Lord Elgin had a firman (permit) from the Greek government, even though it happened to be run by the Turks at the time.

    The Greeks are obviously sore because the Turks gave their cultural patrimony away, and who can blame them? But so it goes.

    On a more practical note, if you compare the British Museum’s lone caryatid from the Erechtheum with her unfortunate sisters who remained in place until recently (there are concrete copies there now), it’s obvious that the Elgin Marbles would be similar lumps of featureless deteriorated stone by now . . .

  4. Tecumseh says:

    Dear Fr Z you must not leave England without getting the real story of the Elgin Marbles. This can be heard on one of the “I’m sorry I haven’t a clue” CD’s where Tim Brooke Taylor and Jeremy Hardy travel to Athens via Victoria, Rome and Constantinople with the famed Marbles and all without exceeding their baggage weight limits. Travel will never be the same again.

Comments are closed.