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    "headline": "A Chilean engineer’s ‘Parthenon’ souvenir came from an older Acropolis temple, Greek experts",
    "description": "Enrico Tosti-Croce's father picked up the marble in Athens in 1930. Greece's archaeologists traced it to the Hekatompedon, built about 123 years before the Parthenon.",
    "datePublished": "2026-10-31T21:46:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Acropolis, Chile, Greece, Parthenon, repatriation",
    "articleBody": "For about 95 years, a carved chip of white marble traveled with one family from Athens to Italy to the Chilean coast, introduced to every guest as “a piece of the Parthenon.” When Greek archaeologists finally examined it, they found the label was wrong in the most flattering way: the fragment belongs to a temple that stood on the Acropolis roughly a century before the Parthenon was begun. The handover itself happened in 2025. Greece’s Ministry of Culture announced the repatriation in July of that year, and the owner told his side of the story in interviews published that November. It is circulating again this week, so here is the full chain, with the dates. Older than the Parthenon A letter from Olympia Vikatou, director of the Greek Archaeological Service, told the Chilean owner what he had really been keeping. Specialists judged the marble to be part of the sima, the decorated rain gutter along a roof edge, from the Hekatompedon, the oldest monumental temple on the Acropolis. Its gutter carried alternating oval palmettes and lotus flowers, the same motif on the Chilean fragment. “It turned out the piece wasn’t from the Parthenon, but from an even older temple,” Tosti-Croce said. The Hekatompedon takes its name from inscriptions meaning “hundred-footer.” Athenians built it around 570 to 550 BC, during the time of Peisistratus, on the spot where the Parthenon now stands. They pulled it down in 490 BC after beating the Persians at Marathon, planning a grander temple that Persian troops then wrecked in 480 BC. Its painted limestone pediments, including a lioness bringing down a calf, are now in the Acropolis Museum. Hekatompedon begun: around 570 BC Parthenon begun: 447 BC Fragment age: about 2,600 years, given that start date Set those dates side by side and the gutter piece is about 123 years older than the building its owners credited it to. It also spent about 95 years outside Greece, from the 1930 visit to the 2025 handover. Where it went The fragment has been handed to the Ephorate of Antiquities of the City of Athens, the office that looks after the city’s archaeological sites. Culture Minister Lina Mendoni said the return came from a “loving collaboration” between her ministry’s cultural-property directorate and the embassy in Santiago. “For Greece, the repatriation of any cultural asset that has been illegally exported gives us great joy and satisfaction,” she said. From a 1930 navy visit to a Santiago embassy The owner, Enrico Tosti-Croce, is a 77-year-old engineer in Villarrica, southern Chile. A radio segment on Greece’s decades-long push to recover the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum made him rethink the family keepsake. “It’s my responsibility to return it,” he said in an interview. He wrote to the Greek Embassy in Santiago in January 2025, traded photos with deputy chief of mission Theodosios Theos, and carried the marble in by hand in late March. The trail behind it starts with his father, Gaetano, an Italian submarine engineer. On a 1930 port call in Athens with the Italian Navy, Gaetano pocketed the carved scrap from the ground near the Parthenon. When the family resettled in Viña del Mar after World War II, it became a dining-room ornament, and Enrico took it over after his parents died in 1994. Visitors heard the Parthenon story every time. “Some believed me; others didn’t,” he said. The piece measures just 8.2 by 11.4 centimeters, about 3.2 by 4.5 inches, with the upper part of a carved anthemion band edged by lotus blossoms. Theos said he hoped the return “can be an example of honor and courage for other citizens in Chile or abroad to do the same.” Further reading Wikipedia: Hekatompedon Image: Fcgsccac, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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