Pope Francis has ordered the return of three Parthenon fragments which have been held in the papal collections of the Vatican Museums for centuries to Greece.
The Vatican has announced that Pope Francis will give the 2,500-year-old fragments to His Beatitude Ieronymos II, the Orthodox archbishop of Athens and All Greece, as a gesture of ecumenical dialogue.
The Pope said the gesture was “as a concrete sign of a sincere desire to continue on the ecumenical journey of witness to the truth.”
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.
