Latest / Thinking Class / #073 - Dr. Mario Trabucco - Decolonisation: How Modern Museums Are Destroying The Cultural Fabric

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#073 - Dr. Mario Trabucco - Decolonisation: How Modern Museums Are Destroying The Cultural Fabric · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Dr.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Mario Trabucco della Toretta.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Mario is a classical archaeologist trained in Sicily and Athens.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: His expertise covers classical Greek architecture and sculpture, ancient Athens and the Elgin Marbles.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: He tweets at Mario underscore Trubuco and runs the YouTube channel at Elgin Marble Games.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Mario and I think out loud about how museums acquire artifacts, the contested nature of certain items, the historical context of ownership, particularly of the Elgin marbles, Greek public opinion regarding the return of the marbles, and the popular narratives that shape these debates.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: We also talk about the challenges of historical interpretation, the implications of reshaping historical narratives for national identity or its dissolution, the commercialization of museums, and the potential dangers of propaganda in cultural institutions and much, much more.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Mario gives us a forensic account of how the Elgin marbles came into the ownership of the British Museum, as well as the role of Western museums in stewardship of culturally and historically important artifacts.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Mario is a fascinating chap with a fascinating job.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And one that, if I wasn't in my day job, I quite fancy doing myself.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure to like, subscribe, and follow the show on YouTube, your favourite podcast platform, and of course Substack, where paid subscribers get the opportunity to contribute questions to a special QA to my guests that only you will get access to.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Let's grow Thinking Class together.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Mario, you are a classical archaeologist.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: You focused on the Greek world, and Lord knows there's an awful lot to get into the history of that part of the world.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it hits the news periodically here in Britain, specifically to do with museum artifacts, which seem to be contested quite frequently.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Requests are often made to return items to the country of origin that have found themselves in British museums.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Before we start talking about some of the more famous museum artifacts like the Elgin marbles or the Parthenon marbles, as they're also called, let's begin with how institutions like the British Museum, for example, which is frequently in the crosshairs of activists and the media, has acquired these exhibits over the years.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: People tend to think were they acquired by fair means or foul?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: What's the story?
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: So generally speaking, we have uh an idea of these museums like uh these immense huge caverns and balls uh full of artifacts, uh, all of them absolutely precious, and uh uh people guarding them jealously, and obviously having acquired them uh in uh ways that sometimes are fair uh less than fair.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the the the label of uh uh the British Familio Mars being the largest uh the world's largest repository of stolen goods uh may be familiar to you and to your uh viewers and listeners.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh nothing can be farthest from the truth.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh because uh if you took uh if you take for example the British Museum, it has eight million artifacts.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh most of them are like uh small uh I won't say insignificant, but insignificant from the broader public, uh shirts of pottery, uh little drawings, um uh uh images, uh pieces of documentation about historical artifacts.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh sometimes you see sketches made uh from from the 1700s, the 1800s.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: All of this is part of these huge uh portal 8 million artifacts.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Things like uh bear in mind, for example, the British Museum is also managing across the entire country the portable antiquity scheme, which is basically you find something with a metal detector in a field, you bring it to the British Museum.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes these things are just a button from a uniform of a hussar of the 1800s, or uh um a key from the 1400s.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: So all of these things sometimes are uh are very significant and sometimes they are not.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: When you look at all of these, and uh and this has been acquired through government grants and government schemes like the Portable Antiquity schemes, through purchases, because obviously there is an endowment with uh that these museums uh get in in order to acquire uh and in uh and enlarge their collections.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then obviously the the entire wealth of things that have been uh uh bequeathed to these museums, obviously, entire collections that have been just entrusted to the trustees of the British Museums uh uh upon the death of somebody in their will.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh all of these is the bull, is the is the is the part that you don't see of the iceberg.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: Then we have a handful of uh very high profile um uh uh items, like the Rovetta Stone, like the Waganaya, light, the Delgian marbles, etc.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: etc.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: And all of these uh have become uh uh contested not because of uh um the the the impropriety in the manner of their acquisition, and we can get into that in a minute, uh, but because of a very uh big ideological position that has gained traction uh in the last uh 10 years, I would say, uh more prominently, but yes, there is uh m at least 30 years worth of studies that have started saying, uh no, they these museums uh are just hoarding stuff, and uh these objects are particularly iconic, particularly significant, therefore they should be better placed in the place that we come from, where they were originally made, as opposed to uh where they are now.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: But people, uh when they receive this kind of mainstream narrative, they don't bother looking at the details.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: They just say, oh, okay, yes, absolutely.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: This is eclipse, and I should go back in Egypt.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Why is it in the British Museum?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing British in the British Museum, and things like this.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh which is is the is the very easy upshot that you want to take from from all of this.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: But can we do policy based on the mainstream upshot, the two uh sentences snippets that you can get from a very cursory and very superficial look that you can have at the at uh whatever it is in a museum?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously not.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why you really need to get into the nitty-gritty and find out.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, there are elements in our museums that have been contested for a very good reason.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: For example, uh Nazi-acquired uh loot and uh uh human remains that are less than a thousand years old.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: And all of these has been progressively studied and uh reflected upon, and the legislation has been changed, for example.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um you will know very well that there is an absolute prohibition of uh alienation, so the accession of getting rid of stuff from the national museums, and in particular the British Museum, because of the 1963 British Museum Act, that says unless something is really unfit for purpose, you cannot get rid of it.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: You must retain it in the collection.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: And uh successive legislation has amended the 1963 British Museum Act to uh exclude specifically from this prohibition things that have been acquired uh because of Nazi appropriation or things that had been uh deemed uh illicitly held because of the recency and because of their consistency as a human uh remains.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why I'm saying uh if you if you look numerically, uh on eight million items, um uh we know that about 100,000 items are uh on display at any given time in the British Museum itself, and uh many more if you look at other satellite exhibitions and exhibitions all around the world, but generally speaking, it's a small portion.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um but the in even of those, it's like a handful, well, probably 10 items that you can really say they are contested.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: So from 10 items out of eight million, to say everything is a huge immense uh uh uh cave of Alibaba and the 40 collectors, like uh a comedian said, uh I think it walked uh in Edinburgh uh at the fringe, then uh it's uh it's definitely uh a very big gulf.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Don't worry, uh to reach.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's let's talk about some of these high-profile items.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think the most uh high profile that is going to stick in most people's minds will be the Elgin marbles, which we've spoken about already.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, from an international relations perspective, things can get a bit frosty between the the Greek governments and the British governments of the day.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: And um and and indeed British celebrities weigh in on the topic.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I know that Robbie Williams was recently touring Greece, he might be there at the moment at time of recording, and he was asked about the Elgin marbles and what should happen to them and should they come back to Greece?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I I think uh he agreed, or he's probably to to say.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I think he said something like Absafucking Lately.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um how did the British Museum come to hold the Elgin marbles and should modern day Greece have them?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: And if not, why not?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a very long and convoluted history, and that's the reason why it's 200 years that we are talking about it, because uh obviously uh if it were very simple, as uh uh many um uh zealot of repatriation would actually uh help you understand, then obviously why are we talking about it uh uh uh for two centuries?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: It should have been done already, but there are complications.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, the British Museum obviously cannot, because of the uh quarter 1963 act, uh, get rid of anything.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: But uh and see anything that has been legitimately acquired.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Now they acquired the marbles in 1816 uh due to an act of parliament.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: This act of parliament authorized the purchase of the marbles from the Rovellian and immediately transferred the ownership uh and uh and um uh of these marbles to the British Museum to care for them for the nation held in trust as everything else that they hold in trust.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um so once they got there, and they got there by act of parliament, obviously they are immediately part of the British Museum.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: But the question that many people say uh impose is okay, but did Air of Elgin have the title to be able to transmit it to the British Museum?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because obviously, if you steal something and then you sell it to the British Museum, we still have a problem.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's where a special report that has been done by a commission that Parliament summoned on the express request of the Earl of Ergin himself comes into play, because they held a commission, a parliamentary commission, and this parliamentary commission was supposed to investigate how the marbles had been acquired, whether this was something that was already the property of the state because Ergin was acting maybe in an official capacity as the ambassador of the uh Britannic government to the sublime port, to the Ottoman Empire.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um in that case, obviously they would not have had to pay for them because they were already uh in the possession of the crown.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and then uh if they were actually worth it.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: So assuming that they were acquired legally and they were acquired in a personal capacity, as they later ascertained, and they even something that we should be bothering ourselves with and spend uh uh X amount of money on.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um they ended up quantifying this X amount of money in£35,000, which in 1816 are a considerable amount of money.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: We are talking about like 5 million uh according to the bank of uh pounds according to the Bank of England, but the the the actual the actual purchasing power and the actual uh significance of the sum is way more than that.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um so they uh ascertained that the uh the Elgin uh did acquire these marbles locally.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there was uh uh an inquiry with many witnesses, everybody was uh newly scrutinized, sometimes even in a very robust manner.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: If you read the report that is published, and everybody can go and download it from Google Books and read it.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: And uh everything was deemed to be uh absolutely spotless, and also the Erlobelin has been deemed to have uh acquired them in a personal capacity, not because of an order of a directive given to him by uh the Foreign Secretary, by the government, by any anyone else.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: So he was acting alone, spending his own money and uh and uh uh upon uh having all the justification to do so.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: This justification, which is also included into the into the um uh report of the select committee, is uh the so-called Firman.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this was a Firman.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's two ways of looking at it, because uh according to a restrictive uh philological uh way of speaking, if you are an Ottomanist, you look at uh at Firmans, they are only sacred decrees that get uh signed by the Sultan, they are all numbered, all recorded in a special register, and and uh uh they are they have a particular sacral value, a little bit like an encyclical from a pulp.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: They are uh uh something uh uh a bit of a big deal.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: On the other side, every um Western traveler in Greece or in Turkey or in Egypt, in Syria, everywhere in the Ottoman Empire would call a Ferman whatever official document coming from the Ottoman Turk.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Lord Byron, for example, refers to his passport as a Ferman.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um there are countless uh travelers uh across the Ottoman Empire that say, ah, okay, I got the Ferman to go and visit such and such place.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: I got a fairman to get such and such antiquities for the British Museum or for whatever.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: So any uh official document coming from the Ottoman government is a Ferman according to Westerners.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: So did Elgin have a Ferman?
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, he did.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: We have uh a very detailed account of how this Ferman was created, uh, who drafted it, which was his private secretary, Reverend Hunt, uh, then who translated it, who uh um uh um drafted the entire uh document uh for the the um the Ottoman court, which was the dragoman of the embassy, then who brought it from the the um uh and the uh Ottoman court to Athens, who was it addressed to, that is the Ottoman governor of Athens and the Chief Justice of Athens, and who brought it there, which was an imperial messenger.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: We know what it did say, because we possess an English uh sorry, an Italian translation of this document, which has also been uh translated into English and then uh included into the uh report of the Select Committee.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: And uh but we also have the original Italian translation which was preserved by um Reverend Hunt in his own personal papers and brought then uh to the commission.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh we know who signed it, who was the Chaimacan.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now the Kaimakan is basically the deputy of the Grand Vizier.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh when the Grand Vizier is uh abroad or elsewhere outside of Constantinople because it's also the Supreme Commander of the Army, he's basically number two after the Sultan, uh then obviously the Chimakan number three becomes the supreme uh administrative authority of the Ottoman government in Constantinople.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, we have somebody who had the authority to give this permission, we have the permission that has been uh crafted in a very uh very clear and very precise administrative manner following a precise iter.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: So whenever you have some people that just come in and say, Ah no, Elgin had a letter that told him that he could do whatever he wanted, we uh there is a very famous scholar of Ottoman uh heritage that is Professor Adam Heldem.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he looked at the uh at the uh Ferman, he um he taught at the College in France, he taught uh at Princeton, he teaches in uh in uh um uh Bogasic University in Turkey, and he looked at it and wrote already in an article uh uh for almost 15 years ago now, uh that basically, according to his experience, having seen all similar documents uh in the flesh, the translation is a faithful translation, and whatever it says is a very possible uh um uh content for the kind of document that it purports to be.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we have a clear uh framework of clues and pieces of evidence that says that Borderin had a permission.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: So he had a permission from the legitimate uh uh um owners of of these uh uh marbles.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: And uh there is another element that gets very much into contention, yes, but were the the the um uh ottomans actually the owners of these uh of these marbles.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, of course they were, because the Ottomans were the internationally recognized uh sovereign authority in Athens in 1801 when uh when uh the facts happened.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: So uh were they uh the sovereignty uh sovereign authority?
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: Because they had conquered Aten in 1458.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Did they conquer it Feren Square?
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: They defeated the Byzantine Empire, which owned uh usually those lands, but not Athens, crucially, uh, in in uh in that particular time.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: So um and uh Athens itself was not a Greek land when the Ottomans conquered the city in 1458, because uh Athens was part of the Duchy of Athens and Neopatra, which was a crusader state, uh settled um set up in 1204 after the Fourth Crusade, when basically most part of the Greek possessions of the Byzantine Empire had been occupied by the crusaders and then subdivided by uh amongst themselves.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: So Athens was not Greek in 1458, and uh according to international law, up until I would say uh the beginning of the uh 20th century, there was a clear cut and and uh recognized uh um right of conquest.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: So if you actually were to conquest a land and there was either a settlement, so a peace conference recognizing the context at the conquest, or the previous possessor of the land had been totally vanquished.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: So there was nobody to make peace with in a way, then in that case, obviously the conquest got ratified and recognized both by all the other states.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: So the Ottomans were not occupiers of the land in the same way as Putin is occupying Ukraine, or like Stephen Fry says, like the Nazis were occupying Paris during World War II.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: That was a settled conquest, which in international uh law terms is very difficult, uh very different from an occupation.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: And grants the owner, the new owner, the conqueror, certain rights, among which is obviously disposing, however they see fit and please, of the public property of the uh conquered land.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: And this public property includes, of course, the military bases.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the Acropolis of Athens in 1801, and since the conqueror, to be honest, was a military base.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: It was a citadel with an Ottoman garrison uh stationed in, and uh uh famously the Parthenon itself was in the state uh in which it was when it was uh inspected by Elgin and his men, uh because in 1687 it was uh an ammunition dump for the garrison, and during the uh one of the many Ottoman Venetian wars, uh the the armies of the Doge uh Morozini uh had what he called a fortunate fortunate shot.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh a mortal shot basically ballooned into the Parthenon, igniting all the ammunition and basically blowing up that the classical temple, which had been converted into a church and then into a mosque and then into an ammunition dump.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: So uh all of this very long and articulated convoluted history is all to say that basically there is a clear transmission of the right of ownership of those sculptures, and this uh transmission goes all the way down to the Ottomans, who then, with a clear, documented and very legitimate uh administrative procedure, grant the possession of these sculptures to the Erlobelgian.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then the Erlovelgian, which at this point has good title to these sculptures, is very free to just give them to the nation in exchange for whatever amount of pounds, in this case, in this case 35,000 pounds in 1816 after a little bit of a negotiation with the government, and then uh uh they end up in the British Museum.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: All links of this chain can be verified, everything is very uh very legitimate, unimpeachable as it has been termed by some lords.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: What's the claim that the the Greeks today are trying to make uh to be able to get them back?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: And uh are there sympathetic ears to it?
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: So in Greece, uh strangely enough, there is no survey of public opinion uh on this theme.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: There was only one research that has been done, and was estimated that basically 99% of the Greeks were in favor of the return of the marbles.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh these kind of percentages you only get in totalitarian regimes.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, uh everybody is uh in agreement with the dominant state narrative that the marbles were stolen by Elgin, which, as I have just demonstrated, is total nonsense, and uh and then uh that they were uh then that they are held only in possession but not in property by the British Museum, and therefore they should be given back to Greece.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's uh in broad terms the narrative.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, uh, whenever you are in more international contexts, uh for example, uh Premier Mitsotakis has nuanced a little bit the position, and so while the Minister of Culture, Lina Mandoni, says they were stolen, then Premier Mitsutakis says they were effectively stolen.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: But things are either stolen or not stolen, and they cannot be effectively stolen.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: So and it's it's it's just uh theater in order to make for um this this uh this narrative.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: What uh the problem is, is that they uh say what they say in spite of the historical documentation, which is the real central point.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: And my main as an historian and archaeologist biff against this position is that you just decide uh which one piece of evidence you want to look at, and then you build a narrative that has been uh carefully crafted by misrepresentation and uh careful selection of the facts to say something that is not what historically happened, or what is the most plausible interpretation of what happened based on the entirety of the evidence that you have at your disposal.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we are lucky enough to have plenty of evidence in this case, because apart from the furman itself, apart from the narrative around the furman, we also have eyewitnesses.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: One of them is uh even Lord Byron, who is uh also the champion of the restitutionist side, uh, in a way, and the noble father of the side of the argument.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because uh bear in mind in Greece, Lord Byron is like a demigod.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there are statues of Byron everywhere, uh people are called Byron as a first name, and uh there are um uh uh roads and squares that are called Byron, etc.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, because of his prominent role as a Phileline and dying uh in the liberation of Missalong.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh the the problem is uh that they say yes, Byron said that they were looted, but at the same time, Byron says in another uh in another uh locus in his very vast uh opus, he says that basically um two painters were succeeding in turn in spoliating the Parthenon by the Tainor of each succeeding Furman.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: So he's basically admitting that there was a Ferman, there were many Firmans actually, and that these two painters, either Lucieri, Dave and Velgin and uh and uh uh Fauvel, the French uh consul, or according to other uh people, uh Lucieri on one side and Gropius, the Austrian consul, on the other side, they were empowered by these uh uh Ottoman administrative documents and permissions to do whatever they were doing.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: There is another friend of Byron's, uh Grongault, uh the writer, who basically says, Ah, I have seen the Ottoman original of the Ferman.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now, when you have all this information, you have uh the um the countess of Elgin, and you say, ah, she's biased because she's the the wife of Lord Elgin.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: She was writing the day in the days before and after the creation of the Ferman in a private letter to uh her father and mother.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: So uh uh are you leading are you trying to to have me believe that she was carefully crafting an artificial narrative that would be used uh 15 years after in order to justify the public purchase of the marbles?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's ridiculous.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: So you have these historical uh witnesses that say that say quite clearly that uh uh Lord Elgin had this permission and that he had this ferment, and he was empowered by this ferment to do basically whatever he wanted.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh with his Dodwell this time, that says Edward Dodwell, the traveler and uh writer.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: And uh uh and no friends of Byron's, and no friend of Elgin's, by the way, uh actually.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: He was quite vicious in the in his descriptions.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: But he basically was giving credit where credit was due, and he was saying quite clearly that people were moaning against the Sultan for the permission he had granted.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: So there are all these little nuggets, and whenever you are reconstructing history, you are relying on little nuggets.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have the 100% entirety of the historical record at your at your disposal.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: And all of them are saying one thing: the Greek government is just brushing everything under the carpet and saying, yeah, no, no, no, I don't care about all this evidence.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: Bible says that they were looted, therefore they've been stolen, therefore, we want them back.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: And all of this is a carefully constructed uh narrative that is uh part of uh the foundational mythology of the Greek state.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: The Greek state uh the the Greeks see the uh reunification of the marbles not uh in just acquisitive term.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's not just uh getting something of value from one side to another, is uh the accomplishment of the national project, is uh one bit of the the Greek revolution that started now more than 200 years ago in 1821, and uh that would be accomplished in a way only finishing off putting together the members of the Parton.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm very sympathetic.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: I come from a place that has um very similar kind of mythologies, uh, and the Italian Retorgimento is another fantastic fairy tale in a way, uh, that talks about the hero Garibaldi defeating the dreadful Bourbons.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, if you go and look at the historical record, the narrative is way less clear-cut.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: But obviously, what they are doing in Greece is exactly the same thing.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: They have the evil Turk that was occupying those lands that were actually being liberated by uh the heroic Greeks.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: And uh obviously, while the Turk was dominating those lands, anything that was given by them, lawfully or not, basically needs to be rolled back and given back to whatever it is, according to them, the legitimate owner that is the Greeks.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: Legitimate owner who is reclaiming this patrimony, this heritage, as proof of their own identity and proof of their own legitimate descendants, descendancy from the heroes of classical times, from the Pericles, from the Themistocles, from the Aristoteles.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it it all of this was entirely not existent when Elgin was there.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: All of these starts at least 15 years, if not 30 years after Lord Elgin.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: And with all goodwill and uh and and uh and good uh political perspective that Lord Elgin definitely had when it came to international politics, as he was very expected at that, uh he could not have foreseen that, not even with a crystal ball.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea sometimes that you uh get from people, ah yes, because only a few years later they would have become uh part of the new reformed Greek state.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: And how was Elgin to know that?
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: We have um uh accounts from from uh other international observers, uh British and otherwise, they all say in those same years there's no way the Greeks are gonna be independent.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: He's a long time in the coming yet.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's not something that is happening, it's not something that could even be beneficial.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: Lord Byron himself says that the Greeks are not uh uh independent and God forbid they ever should.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: Which is uh, if you look at it from a perspective of today, it's a very, very racist kind of thing uh uh to say, should we topple some statues of Lord Byron because of this?
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: But is that that's what I'm saying is if you start picking shooting and then you start uh pulling the timeline of history to shoot your narrative, then uh you get to this this kind of monsters.
• 35:29
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• 35:34
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• 35:43
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• 36:02
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• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: You were just describing how uh for those countries that are contesting the ownership of artifacts, they are uh pointing to periods of history in a in a bid to do some mythmaking for national unity.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's probably fair to say that um the opposite thing is happening within Western countries at the moment, where our our cultural elite are um shaping, reshaping historical narratives uh in a bid to create uh national disunity in some way, so that they can then create new myths.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think if anyone who's watching, listening uh wants examples of that, if you haven't visited a museum recently, if you go there, I think you will find that um almost everything that you look at is now getting a disclaimer that explains that somehow the the previous owner or whatever has been implicated in something dark and nasty and it's a stain on British history.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so my question to you, Mario, as someone who's uh you're you're a classical archaeologist, you spend your time drifting in and out of museums and in excavation digs.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: And uh what's your what's your view of how museums, antiquities, archaeology is presented to the public in the modern age?
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: And what impact do you think this has on general public's perception of the past that you know those people who aren't connected to the wider political conversations?
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: So there is a process that is going on uh in uh in museums nowadays, and it's uh the blockbusterization of museums.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: So museums are places of entertainment.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not just me saying that it's uh it's uh the um uh the ICOMOS, the International Commission of Museums uh themselves that have redefined the definition of museum.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: And now this definition uh involves entertainment uh alongside education uh as a value, as as um a social function of museums uh that was uh that is uh little by little supplanting the original function of museums as places of science, places that are basically uh uh preserving uh the material relics of antiquity and past history, uh, and then they are studying, cataloging them, making them accessible to scholars in order to create the unified and shared narrative of our own cultural identity.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um this function is going a little bit more into the darkness, and instead the the big exhibitions, the crowd pleasing is uh is becoming the real business of museums, even national museums, a little bit because of crisis in funding, a little bit because of the delegitimization that is going on uh uh uh of the whole uh uh system of museums and what they mean for society.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: This is because uh uh share cultural and material heritage is basically fundamental to our identity.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: And uh uh museums should be the place where basically you go and find the proof, the the tangible proof that whatever you have been taught at school is actually true.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: That that that's that idea that we are coming from uh uh the uh the Anglo-Saxons and then the Viking and the Romans before them, and all all of this is true because you go into a museum and you actually see the proof of this.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: You see the Kmerions to see the desk would understand.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: And uh uh this proof is basically uh being kept and being spent money upon because it's a social value to have it.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: And uh this is now becoming something that is a little bit more contested, and uh and that's where the danger of the danger lies.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because as soon as you start uh questioning the cultural identity, you are starting to shake the glue that is basically bonding people together.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: That unified narrative that the Greeks on the other side are very very adamant that they want to get and they want to actually enhance.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: We are in a in a position where, as you were rightly saying, we are demolishing this edifice, we are getting rid of elements, we are in a position where we are purifying our national history according to somebody, Dan Hicks and and David Ozoga and similar, uh, Ibrahim Kennedy and similar um advocates of decolonization of our museums as a social mission.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, these people are basically saying no, these uh uh museums are the physical proof of a bad narrative that we should challenge and we should demolish, and actually we would be in a much better place if there was no museum whatsoever.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the the the paradoxical thing is that these people work in museums, so the curators of the very museums uh that we that they were supposed to curate and uh and uh and uh uh study and popularize and uh attract us too, they are basically the first haters, the haters-in-chief of these um uh cultural institutions which are no longer making culture but making uh spectacularization and popularization and just entertainment.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so it's it's it's a very uh uh troubling time to be living in when it comes to autumnism, because this translates into two approaches.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: One is uh babifying the audiences, where you are basically putting things in their mind, instead of giving them the facts and giving them uh a scientific narrative, uh an objective narrative, you just go and say, Yeah, that's what you should be thinking of.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: They are instruments of oppression.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's the proof that such and such was linked to slavery, and that's the proof that this was brought here to please Queen Victoria about all their colonial empire, etc.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: etc.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: The this the um uh exhibition that uh has been uh recently flows at the British Museum, the one uh from the uh Ghanaian uh uh um artist uh help me out here.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: I still remember the name in this moment.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: Anyways, I can't remember the name, but I know which one you mean.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: It will come to me.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: The um museum, the exhibition is called What We Have Here.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's basically this Ghanaian artist, British Ghanaian artist that is basically looking at pieces from the collections of the British Museum, and it's building a narrative that purportedly wants you to uh uh think for yourself and uh and make your own judgment.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: And there are even voices recorded when you visit the exhibition uh saying, uh, think about this, think about that, etc.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: But then what is basically building is a picture of this evil British Empire that.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Was uh exploiting as much as possible all the uh resources and natural resources and economic resources in the very population of these um uh occupied places.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so it's it's uh it's disheartening when you see this happening in the museums because it's not scientific, it's not culture, and uh it's it's perverting the function of the museum itself.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: The very reason why places like the British Museum were founded in 1753 was to educate the people to the diversity and the breadth and the uh and and uh um and the wide variety that there is uh across the world and in our history, etc.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: Nowadays there is a museum that is seen as an indoctrination place that is uh parroting the mainstream narrative, is becoming basically an arm of what in Italy was called during fascism, the Minku Pop, the Ministry of Cultural of Popular Culture.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: So basically the equivalent of Goebbels Ministry of Propaganda.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and when a museum becomes a place of propaganda, you end up with the situation that the Greeks are in right now.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: Where the corporate museum is a museum that has been built with one specific function, telling everyone the marbles are ours and we need them back.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: The red guards, that that uh the war against the four olds, or at least specifically around an old culture.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I I suppose I don't know if you've seen the meme.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it's because you and I have ended up following each other on Twitter, but a meme not long after that happened, uh, it threw up into my algorithm.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: And uh in fact, it wasn't even a meme, it was just a picture of an empty room, and it was um this is this is what the British Museum's going to look like if the um if the curator has their way.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose my question to you is on on this trajectory, uh, where does this all end?
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: And is there any prospect of this turning around anytime soon?
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: Are there more people like you who are uh trying to present a more balanced picture and move away from this and and try to get into the institutions, or uh is this just something we have to suffer every time we go to a museum for the foreseeable future?
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: Had we spoken uh a month ago, I would uh uh I would have been uh much more uh pessimistic than I am right now, because uh uh you might uh have seen that basically there are uh uh five new trustees in the board of the British Museum, and uh one of them is the historian Tom Holland, so therefore somebody with accustomed to uh look at evidence and uh decide by uh for himself.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_01: And uh on the other side there is Stephanie Jenkins, who has written a book specifically on uh um what does it mean keeping cultural artifacts in our museums and why we should resist the temptation of repatriation on ideological grounds.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the the also on the sour on the front of the Parthenon Marbles themselves, uh there is a beautiful book by Alexander Herrman, for example, that contests and changes a little bit the narrative and gives a proper account of the historical evidence.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: In these cases, uh all of these cases are basically reason to think about a future where there is a correction of uh of the course that we were uh dangerously going uh uh towards.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: And uh uh yes, the problem is that we are in a state of flux right now.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: We are in a state where uh people like uh uh Hicks, O Lotoga, and then Candy are in a position of uh power in a way, here are in a position of broadcasting their ideas, therefore they are making uh uh many many uh uh followers, and all these followers are uh genuinely, I want to believe, animated by uh a willingness to be kind.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem is that the kindness without truth becomes sentimentality, which uh uh was William said not by me but uh by uh Benedict XVI.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and uh it's uh it's uh it's a situation where uh people uh uh that speak like me, for example, and say the things that I say are saying it in close circles because they have something to lose, and if say if they say it uh too loud and too much, they have uh they are at serious risk of being cancelled, for example.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a situation where uh we have these risks on one side, elements to be hopeful on the other, and amongst these elements there is a growing uh growing front of uh publications, for example, that are helping out in uh debunking these myths and deconstructing these dangerous narratives.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking about uh War on the West by Douglas Magray, but I'm thinking about War Against Ing History by Frank Fugredi, for example, or Benedict Bakold in his book talking about the phenomenon of oikophobia where basically culture starts eating itself.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: So uh all of these is getting exposed, and that's why I'm hopeful because there are people reading these books, there are people going to these museums, and they are seeing uh that the narrative that they see on one side doesn't correspond to whatever has been told them on the other side.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Hope Springs Eternal as always.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: Let's hope we can start to see uh museums becoming what they were intended to be once more, and uh and and not and not and not have them collapsing in on themselves uh and uh all of the things that we've spoken about today.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um coming into the the the final few minutes, go on.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: I know I want I want just to add that if this is not the case, we better close them.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because uh between aiming them as what they are supposed to be and uh aiming them as uh as uh arms of propaganda, obviously as arms of propaganda, they don't have a social function.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: They don't that they don't have a raison d'être, therefore they don't need to be publicly funded, therefore they better uh close each other doors.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm maybe very very extreme in saying so, but I I see what you're saying.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think the issue is is that the the institutions that are publicly funding them likely are staffed with people with a very similar worldview and probably see it as yeah, go and speak truth to power.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um they're all on the same team.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's very true.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's very true.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh although there is uh a silver lining to that, and it is that even publicly funded museums uh need to do fundraising.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, uh there are uh uh moments where obviously uh big companies, uh big corporate donors uh may well come off this bandwagon and and say, no, you know what, I'm not gonna give you 550 million pounds uh for doing this.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the same thing that we are looking at with the with the whole diversity and inclusion uh chapter, where it was all the rage uh five years ago and it's it's now being questioned.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, you can certainly see tack being changed on that.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_00: I work in the corporate world, and I can see I wouldn't necessarily say a full recession on it.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_00: I can see people trying to change the language um uh to try and uh slip under the covers a little bit, but uh that certainly you can tell the mood is changing on quite a few of these.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so let's see where we where we go, Mario.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Mario, I'd like to ask all of my guests this question at the end of the show.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in the spirit of sharing that we're all we're always always thinking, reevaluating what it is that we know and think and believe.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that question is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life that perhaps you thought was once set in stone?
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_00: And and what was it that made you think differently?
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I used to be a very uh scientific person in a way, very deterministic.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I was uh a firm believer that if you had all the information in the world and you had uh what now we have at the point of our fingers, like a large language model that could contain all the information in the world, we could basically know history and know not only the past but even the future.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now uh after studying history for so long, I am actually very skeptical of the very possibility of knowing the past for sure.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_01: And uh there was really a book that kind of was the pivotal moment in here, and it is not a book about history, but is an economics classic, and it is The Human Action by Ludwig von Mises.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: And uh uh in in that book he basically describes uh the way uh according to him uh the the decision making is formed.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: And one thing that basically uh goes into at some length is the um the imperfect character of human knowledge.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: So and whenever you look at history, whenever you look at the work of the historians, uh basically every single item is imperfect.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: The inputs are imperfect because they are fragmentary, the selection is imperfect because there is somebody who is going to say this is important, this is not.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the the the interpretation of it uh may be fallacious.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: So all of it, if you maximize these uh across the entirety of the work of the historians, basically tells you that you can have a very pallid, very, very blurry uh idea of what plausibly happened, but never you may have the idea of what actually happened.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: This means uh that our work is useless, no, uh, but definitely made me reframe the importance of our work as historians, uh, because like in Christian theology, we have perfection and we are imperfect, we know that we don't uh uh have any hope of being perfect in this life, but nonetheless we tend to perfection.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: The same is with the work of the historian.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: We work tirelessly in creating this most plausible narrative which tends to the perfection of what it was, even if we are painfully aware that we will never get it.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the long the long path to truth.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_00: You can never be quite sure you're on it, but you you're always trying to find it.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean always approximating, but they will never patch.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: Fascinating.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that I I respect that you were able to have that realization and not end up um feeling uh almost uh nihilistic in some way when you realized you were this far down a path in this academic field, and then it was you you had this light bulb moment of like how am I doing?
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: So well done.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well done.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well done for keeping a big smile on your face because lots of lots of people could have taken that very badly indeed.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, oh no god, this I don't even know what any of this means.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: No, I know, and yeah, looking at meaning, uh it's uh the sense of life in a way, and obviously, even whenever we are doing this work that seems hopeless, uh uh we we still are um basically being uh helpers of tooth in a way.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now that's that's something that we should each hang our hat on.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_00: If we if we all oriented ourselves towards that, then things would be certainly a bit a bit clearer out there.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_00: Mario, before I let you go, where can people find you?
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_00: What can we expect from you next?
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh are you working on anything?
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: So yes.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm I'm always on Twitter.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Twitter is definitely the place where I still am.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: And uh yes, uh you can call it text these days, but I still like to call it Twitter.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm also on Blue Sky recently, and uh uh I opened a small YouTube channel called Marble Games, uh, where I'm trying to push a little bit of historical knowledge around uh and LG Marbles and the wider uh cultural context of the LG Marbles, and uh both uh of the 1800s, the ancient one and the modern one.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: And uh uh and I'm writing a book obviously on it, uh which uh uh it's uh a big endeavor, especially when I do these uh uh very much part-time.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but uh at some point you will have news of these.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll certainly look forward to it, and I will make sure to include your YouTube channel within the show notes along with your other socials.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_00: Mario, it's been a pleasure.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_00: I certainly learned way more in this conversation.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and I'm I I certainly had an outline of some of the things we spoke about today, but largely was operating in the ignorance.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you for lifting the veil of ignorance.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I certainly hope to be able to speak again about things that you're working on in the future.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_00: Nico.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 59:51
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• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.