When Enrico Tosti-Croce heard on the radio that Greece was intensifying its efforts to recover the marble fragments of the Parthenon scattered around the world, he immediately thought of a small piece kept at his home in Chile. This 77-year-old engineer remembered that his father, Gaetano Tosti-Croce, an Italian sailor in the 1930s, had brought it from Athens thinking it came from the famous temple dedicated to the goddess Athena.
The piece, only a few centimeters long, is engraved with a lotus flower. After examination by Greek archaeological services, the story took an unexpected turn: the fragment did not come from the Parthenon, but from an even older temple, which has now disappeared. Scholars have determined that it belongs to the Hecatompedon, an Archaic-era temple that stood on the Acropolis of Athens before the construction of the Parthenon.
The Hecatompedon was one of the first temples dedicated to Athena. He would have occupied the place from -570 to -490 BC. BC, when it was destroyed by Persian invasions and replaced by new buildings, including the Parthenon. The fragment rendered by Enrico Tosti-Croce would have been part of a water evacuation structure, decorated with sculpted motifs typical of the Archaic period.
An unexpected discovery
In a letter addressed to Enrico Tosti-Croce, the director of the archaeological service, Olympia Vikatou, confirmed this identification. The marble, she explained, will join Greek public collections. The authorities expressed their gratitude to the donor for his voluntary gesture respectful of Greek heritage.
The fragment had been kept by the family for almost a century, first in Italy, then in Chile, where Enrico settled. According to him, his father, a sailor in the Royal Italian Navy, had probably picked it up during a stopover in Athens, without realizing its historical value.
Although modest, this symbolic restitution is part of a broader context. Greece has been demanding for decades the return of the Parthenon marbles, taken away at the beginning of the 19th century.e century by Lord Elgin and today kept in the British Museum in London. Enrico Tosti-Croce’s gesture obviously does not resolve this heritage dispute, but it testifies to a growing attention paid to the provenance of old objects and their return to their country of origin.
For archaeologists, the story of this small fragment also has scientific significance: it enriches knowledge of the archaic temple of the Acropolis, of which few elements have reached us. By handing over this piece of stone to Greece, Enrico Tosti-Croce unknowingly returned a fragment of the past much older than he imagined.
