SANTIAGO, Chile – When Enrico Tosti-Croce would first invite a guest to his home, he would point out a stone placed on a stand by the coat rack near the entrance to the house. The stone, about 3 1/4 inches by 4 1/2, was a piece of marble carved with lotus flowers. “When someone came to my house for the first time, I would show them that stone and say: ‘This is from the Parthenon’,” Tosti-Croce told The Art Newspaper. “Some believed me, others didn’t.”
The marble carving of lotus flowers that Tosti-Croce inherited from his father [Greek Ministry of Culture]
Tosti-Croce had inherited the stone from his parents, who passed away within a few weeks of each other in 1994. His father, Gaetano, told him that he had found the stone while serving in the Italian Navy in the 1930s. He visited the Acropolis and found the carving on the ground near the base of Parthenon, the famous temple to the goddess Athena, and took it with him.
Gaetano served as the chief engineer of the Console Generale Liuzzi submarine, which was sunk by the British in 1940, just a few weeks after the Italians under Mussolini officially entered World War II. Gaetano was taken a prisoner of war, and, after the Italian surrender, left the country and emigrated to Chile, where, according to El País, he set up shop as a mechanical engineer in the city of Viña del Mar. Tosti-Croce recalled the marble sitting on a shelf in the dining room throughout his childhood: it was “just another ornament,” he says.
But earlier this year Tosti-Croce, now a 77-year-old retired engineer in Villarrica, heard a story on the radio about Greece’s continuing attempts to regain the Elgin Marbles from the United Kingdom. “Wow, I have a little piece of the Parthenon,” he recalled thinking. “I think it’s time to give it back.”
Tosti-Croce reached out to the Greek embassy in Santiago on January 6th to offer to return the marble his father had taken nearly a century before. Theodosios Theos, the deputy chief of mission at the embassy, requested measurements and photographs and eventually an in-person examination. Tosti-Croce put the ancient marble in a cloth sack, placed it into luggage cushioned by his clothes, and delivered it to the embassy. All he asked for was to learn which part of the Parthenon the piece came from – “to close the cycle,” as he said.
Several months later Tosti-Croce received a message from Olympia Vikatou, the director of the Greek Archeological service, to tell him that his father’s story was slightly incorrect. The piece was not, in fact, part of the Parthenon – rather, it was likely part of an even older temple that preceded it, the Hekatompedon, built circa 570-550 B.C.E. The marble was probably part of a gutter on the temple, which had been excavated from the hills of Mount Hymettus.
“It comes from the sacred rock of the Acropolis, a unique monumental symbol that has suffered greatly from systematic looting over time,” said Vikatou, according to El País.
Reconstruction of the west pediment of the Hekatompedon at the Acropolis Museum [Fcgsccac, Wikimedia Commons, CC 4.0]
The Hekatompedon was the first monumental temple at the site of the Acropolis. The name, which means “one hundred feet long,” though it was actually about 150 feet in length. The temple was demolished in 490 after the Athenian victory at the Battle of Marathon against the Persians so that the first iteration of the Parthenon could be built; that temple was destroyed a decade later in 480 by the returning Persians, and was ultimately replaced with the Parthenon that has endured to today.
The lotus flower carving returned by Tosti-Croce is now in the hands of the ephorate of antiquities in the city of Athens, according to a message posted by the Greek Ministry of Culture. Many other pieces of the Hekatompedon are on display at the Acropolis Museum, where some have been placed in a reconstruction of the temple’s pediment.
The Greek Embassy honored Tosti-Croce this past week for his actions during a piano concert. Theos, the deputy chief, called Tosti-Croce’s decision to return the marble “an example of honor and courage for other citizens in Chile or abroad to do the same.”
As for Tosti-Croce himself, he has expressed pride in how the situation has turned out. “When I left the Greek embassy after handing over the piece of marble,” he told The Art Newspaper, “I felt a special kind of satisfaction. I don’t even know how to describe it… I felt like I had done something good.”
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