Mitsotakis says Greece will not borrow the Parthenon sculptures it calls its own

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in Thessaloniki on 3 October that Greece will not accept an arrangement on the Parthenon sculptures that implies recognition of foreign ownership, and that it will not borrow what he called its own treasures. He was speaking at the Museum of Byzantine Culture, at an event built around an exchange of objects with Bulgaria.

The Bulgarian side of the day was concrete. President Rumen Radev said the two countries had left older disputes behind them. Forty-eight artefacts are going on display until 5 November, then returning to the places they were taken from. Euronews reported the exchange as the occasion for the Parthenon remarks, not as a template Mitsotakis was offering London.

He separated the two cases in the speech itself. Monuments and historic objects, he said, cannot be treated as spoils of war, or as victims of circumstances that arose after they were made. The same principle of a monument's integrity, he said, is what sits under the effort to reunite the Parthenon sculptures. He called them evidence of a living connection with the landscape that produced them, then said the Parthenon is a unique and self-contained case, and that it cannot be closed inside legal or technical issues. The point, in his wording, is the aesthetic and semantic integrity of a monument he described as violently dismembered. He ended on a line his office has used before: the time had come for truth, reason, justice and morality.

The legal position he is refusing is a loan. A loan from the British Museum would require Greece to take the sculptures as the museum's property for the term of the loan, and to send them back. Mitsotakis is saying Athens will not sign that. A Guardian article on 24 September had already carried the same refusal, aimed at any use of the Bayeux Tapestry loan as a precedent. The Thessaloniki speech puts that refusal in a set speech, next to a Balkan exchange that does run on return.

The contrast is the useful part. Greece and Bulgaria can show 48 objects until 5 November because both sides have agreed the objects go home. The Parthenon marbles, removed from the Acropolis in the early nineteenth century under a firman whose scope Athens and London still dispute, have no agreed homecoming date. About half the surviving sculpted material is in Athens, in the Acropolis Museum, lined up opposite plaster casts of the pieces in London. The other half is in the British Museum. A loan would fill the Athenian gaps for a season and then reopen them. That is the arrangement he said he will not take.

No British Museum response was in the Euronews copy of the speech. The museum's long position has been that the sculptures were acquired legally and that it can lend them. Mitsotakis did not open a negotiation in Thessaloniki. He repeated a condition: no recognition of title, no loan. The 48 Bulgarian-Greek objects will be back in their places after 5 November. The Parthenon frieze will not, on the terms he set on Friday.