Greece has rejected claims made by the British Museum that marbles taken from the Parthenon were “removed from the rubble”.
The longstanding dispute centres on claims from Greek authorities that the artefacts were violently detached from the temple with the aid of marble saws, while being overseen by Lord Elgin.
The museum’s deputy director, Dr Jonathan Williams, told a Unesco meeting on Friday: “Much of the frieze was in fact removed from the rubble around the Parthenon.
“These objects were not all hacked from the building as has been suggested.”
Lisa Mendoni, Greece’s culture minister, rubbished the museum’s claims.
She told the Guardian: “Over the years, Greek authorities and the international scientific community have demonstrated with unshakeable arguments the true events surrounding the removal of the Parthenon sculptures.
“Lord Elgin used illicit and inequitable means to seize and export the Parthenon sculptures, without real legal permission to do so, in a blatant act of serial theft.”
The British Museum bought the antiquities from Lord Elgin in 1816.
It has 15 metopes, 17 pedimental figures and 75-metres of the original 160-metre long frieze in their collection.
Greece has campaigned for the return of the sculptures, which saw a marble fragment of the temple permanently returned to Athens from a museum in Italy on Friday.
The government announced the “so-called Fagan fragment, which was included in the collection of the 19th century British consul general to Sicily Robert Fagan, could “stay in Greece forever”.
“Sicily paves the way for the return to Greece of the Parthenon marbles,” the country’s culture ministry said on Friday.
The British Museum, custodian of the marbles which include about half of the 160-metre frieze that adorned the Parthenon, has ruled out returning them, saying “the sculptures are part of everyone’s shared heritage and transcend cultural boundaries”.
Greece has stepped up its campaign for their return in recent years after opening a new museum in 2009 at the foot of the Acropolis hill that it hopes will one day house them.
In March, the United Nations’ cultural agency Unesco urged Greece and the UK to hold talks and reach a settlement on the issue.
