Should we refuse to give the Bayeux tapestry back to France? Of course not! So why are we keeping the Parthenon marbles? | Simon Jenkins
It is simply wrong for the British Museum to hoard what doesn’t belong to Britain. Let the squabbling end and the sculptures be returned to Greece
For the Bayeux tapestry to return to France would be a scandal. It is British, probably made in Canterbury by British women, and displays one of the greatest events in British history. The tapestry certainly does not belong in Normandy. It is right that it is now on British soil in the British Museum. Its display is so brief that the herd of visitors desperate to catch a glimpse of the medieval artwork must be jostled to keep moving, as if watching Shakespeare’s Henry V on fast-forward. So let’s keep it. Everybody knows possession is nine-tenths of the law. We can call it a long-term loan.
I am joking, of course. This is largely what I assume the British Museum is worried might happen if it lent the precious Elgin, or Parthenon, marbles to Athens. In the Guardian last month, the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, argued that the status of the Bayeux tapestry is parallel to that of the Parthenon marbles. “Both were conceived as single works, intended to be seen and understood as a whole,” he wrote, arguing it was time for the marbles to be reunited.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
