Let’s say you are an old Greek billionaire and want to repatriate the Elgin Marbles back to Greece. Is there any conceivable way with say 100 million dollars at your disposal to remove these from the British Museum and get them on their way back to Greece before the alert is sounded?
Is there anyway this could possibly be done? What’s the plan?
I’d say funding the potential war and economic upheaval after such an act would cost more than stealing them.
Let’s face it, had Elgin not taken the statues, they’d be corroded cores of their original beauty. Repatriate someday, perhaps. But not with Greece tottering on the brink again and likely unable to protect them.
Asking for a friend?
Let me introduce you to my friend the stocky Korean man with the bowler hat.
You need to plan an old-fashioned heist along with a good director. And a hoist.
Still, they should have been given back 2 or 3 decades ago, and certainly during the financial crisis everyone has shut up about. Just depressing Anglo mean-spiritedness to hang on to them now.
And no, I don’t think everything should be given back from out of the everywhere into the here. Just the big ticket items.
Jim Henson was a pretty good director. Unfortunately no longer available.
Send 'em back now and they’d probably get sold to private collectors in a poor attempt to ease the current financial chaos in Greece.
You guys are aware that Greece already has some other chunks of old marble laying around, right? And that they seem to be doing at least a half-decent job at looking after them? (And, yes, by “half-decent” I mean building one of the best museums in the world.)
Are there massive sewer tunnels under the British Museum? I am thinking making identical copies, doing the switching during the nights when the museum is closed up from the sewers, and bribing the guards working overnight…
Best way is to challenge the museum to a game of marbles and win them back that way.
Greece. The land of broken and missing statues. Skip it and spend the afternoon in the British museum instead, since most of the best stuff is there anyway.
Building nice museums: An integral part of the White Man’s Burden.
Well if this heist is going to work, were going to need a distraction so no one notices us sneaking around the museum. We could get Nichelle Nichols to do a fan dance maybe?
The British museum has for a long time had its greedy eyes on Greece’s scrappy up-and-coming summer camp on the other side of the lake. They could wager the marbles for the camp at the annual summer lake games. There’s no way the new camp counsellor, Steve Guttenberg, can get those lovable Greece underdogs ready for the games in time. The British museum has this in the bag.
I, for one, am confident in the success of a repatriation heist. I can see only one problem: The headline “Britain loses its marbles” has already been used for the Brexit vote.
I’m sure these guys could do the job!
No wonder they have financial problems!
Learn a lesson from Vincenzo Peruggia who was sure he’d be hailed as a hero for returning the Mona Lisa from the Louvre to Italy and was instead arrested by Italian authorities as an art thief.
Put me in charge of the negotiation. I’ll buy them back for $60M, ship and install them* for $10M, and the other $20M is my fee.
I think they’d be pretty difficult to steal from the museum, not just because it has security systems and protocols, but also, because they’re freaking huge blocks of stone. The logistics of moving them all out of their places in a short space of time would be pretty damn hard, even if it was part of a planned, authorised event - so it would be almost impossible to steal them from the museum.
I reckon you’d have to try to organise for them to go ‘on tour’ (maybe to Elgin, Moray), allow the museum to carefully pack them up and load them, then hijack the transport.