"Parthenon 'Marvels' negotiations to Greece ahead of UK-Greece summit"

Prior to the UK-Greece summit, negotiations are reportedly taking place over the Parthenon marble sculpture group owned by the British Museum, Marbles' trip to Greece.

Citing senior government sources, Britain's Sky News reported that Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Greek Foreign Minister Georg Gerapetritis had three closed-door meetings with former Finance Minister George Osborne, who chairs the British Museum Foundation and the museum.

This comes as Prime Minister Mitsotakis is scheduled to visit London tomorrow (3rd) for a summit with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

In November last year, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak decided to hold a summit with Mitsotakis but canceled the meeting just before after Greece continued to demand the return of the Parthenon Marbles.

Starmer has no plans to revise domestic laws that prevent the permanent return of foreign cultural assets in British museums, but he is said to be more flexible than former Prime Minister Sunak.The group of marble sculptures, known by the nickname

Elgin Marbles', are about 75 m of the 160 m long sculptures in the Parthenon in Athens, Greece in the 5th century BC.

The Athens Acropolis Museum holds much of the rest and has a small part in the museum of five other European cities.

The British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin, took Marbles out of Greece under the Ottoman Empire in the early 19th century, which Greece saw as theft, while Britain has claimed that the Earl of Elgin was transferred with the permission of the Ottoman Empire.