Pope Francis orders return to Greece of Parthenon sculptures held in Vatican

[Eugene]

Source: CNN Style

Pope Francis orders return to Greece of Parthenon sculptures held in Vatican

Published 18th December 2022

Pope Francis has decided to return to Greece three 2,500-year-old pieces of the Parthenon that have been in the papal collections of the Vatican Museums for more than a century.

The Vatican said in a brief statement on Friday that the pope was giving them to Ieronymos II, the head of the Greek Orthodox Church, as a gesture of ecumenical dialog with the Roman Catholic Church.

The Parthenon, which is on the Acropolis in Athens, was completed in the fifth century BC as a temple to the goddess Athena, and its decorative friezes contain some of the greatest examples of ancient Greek sculpture.

It was not immediately clear what plans Ieronymos had for the small sculptures.

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/vatican-greece-parthenon-sculptures/index.html