Pope Francis has decided to return three fragments of the Parthenon of Athens to Greece and they will be given to the Archbishop of Athens and all Greece, Hieronymus II, as a «concrete sign of the sincere desire to continue on the ecumenical path,» reports the official Vatican portal, Vatican News.
These three fragments are currently kept in the Pontifical Collections and in the Vatican Museums, where they have been «carefully guarded for centuries» and exposed to millions of visitors from all over the world, according to the Holy See.
They are three fragments that arrived in Rome in the 19th century by unknown routes and were brought together in the collections of the Profane Gregorian Museum, commissioned by Pope Gregory XVI. They are torn and washed out of Pentelic marble, which belonged to the legendary decorative apparatus of the Parthenon, sculpted by Phidias between 447 and 432 BC at the behest of Pericles.
The first is a horse’s head that came from the western pediment of the temple and would have been part of one of the four horses of the chariot led by the goddess Athena, in dispute with Poseidon for the dominion of Attica. The second represents the head of a child holding a tray, which must have been part of the frieze that covered the cell of the naos, the most sacred and secret place of the temple because it housed the chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos, also the work of the famous Greek sculptor.
Finally, the third relief corresponds to a bearded male head that would have been identified in one of the metopes placed on the south side of the same temple, where the centauromaquia, the fight of the centaurs against the Lapiths, was represented.
A year ago, Hieronymus II and the Pope met on the occasion of Francis’ trip to Cyprus and the Greek capital, December 2-6. Both reaffirmed their desire to continue together on the path of fraternity and peace.
