A Chilean man has returned a 2,500-year-old piece of marble to Greece after his family displayed it as home decor for nearly 90 years. Enrico Tosti-Croce contacted the Greek Embassy in Chile in January 2025 after hearing a radio story about Greek efforts to recover the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum.
His father, Gaetano, picked up the marble fragment while visiting the Acropolis in the 1930s during his service with the Italian Navy. The family assumed it was a piece of the Parthenon, and when they relocated to Chile in the 1950s, the chunk of marble ended up as a shelf ornament. After his parents died in 1994, Tosti-Croce inherited it and kept it on his coat rack.
The fragment weighs about two-and-a-half pounds and measures roughly three inches tall by four-and-a-half inches wide. Tosti-Croce had one condition before handing it over: he wanted to know exactly which part of the Acropolis it came from.
Months after the handover, he received a letter from Olympia Vikatou, director of the Greek Archaeological Service, identifying the piece as part of a marble gutter system from the Hekatompedon. That temple was built around 550 B.C.E., making it about a century older than the Parthenon. The Persians destroyed it in 480 B.C.E.
Greek Minister of Culture Lina Mendoni said Greece believes all illegally exported antiquities must be returned to their country of origin as part of the collective identity of their people. The Greek Embassy in Chile praised Tosti-Croce and expressed hope his decision would encourage others holding similar artifacts to come forward.
Tosti-Croce said handing over the marble left him with a feeling he struggled to put into words, describing it simply as knowing he had done something good.
