Souvenir or theft: Is it ever OK to take a piece of your travels home?

From pilgrims pinching fragments of the True Cross to Grand Tour travellers half-inching Hellenic trinkets, trophy hunting and travel has a long and controversial history. With her new novel drawing on this theme, author Victoria Hislop explores the ethics of pilfering relics from foreign destinations

Victoria Hislop has written about the scourge of taking archaeological finds from ancient sites (Bill Waters)

The practice of taking something home from your travels is nothing new. Pilgrims returning from visits to the Holy Land brought with them small pieces of rock or clay from a sacred site, or water or oil that had been sanctified by contact with a saint’s body and put in a small phial. For these devout “tourists”, such objects would probably remain with them for the rest of their lives, and relics of actual holy bones were used as the basis to set up new churches. The ultimate “take home”, after its supposed discovery in the 4^th century, was a fragment of the “True” cross (the crucifix to which Jesus Christ had been nailed). Naturally there was money to be made from this and fakes abounded. They say that if all the pieces of the “cross” were put together, there would have been enough to build a ship.

In all eras, conquerors of other nations brought home “booty”. To steal another nation’s wealth and treasure made a victory over them even more impressive – and the conquest more humiliating for the loser.

From the 17^th century (and during the two hundred years that followed), the Grand Tour became an essential part of education for an aristocratic or wealthy gentleman. Inevitably these travellers wanted to take home physical reminders to display to their friends, objects that would prove their credentials as learned, cultured individuals. And the options were anything from ancient coins, paintings (often created for the “tourist”), architectural models of temples and treasures and, in many cases, original, full-sized sculptures and busts, the purchase of which was often legitimate.

Island life: Victoria Hislop stands in front of Spinalonga in Greece (Victoria Hislop)

Elgin was perhaps the ultimate souvenir hunter, sending back from Athens several ships full of sculptures from the Parthenon. It is well documented that he had been given permission to take impressions of the Parthenon Sculptures in order to make reproduction but instead hacked the originals off the face of the temple intending to use them to embellish his new home. He was not content with the idea of copies or miniatures. He wanted the originals.

His actions caused shock and consternation even at the time, as onlookers watched the devastation of the ancient frieze. Some of the sculptures had to be broken in order to make them more easily transportable, some of them sank to the bottom of the sea during transportation, and only bankruptcy forced Elgin to look for a buyer when he finally got back to London. The British Museum gave him £35,000, which was not the nominal “value” of the sculptures, but approximately covered his expenses for the labour used to remove the sculptures and shipping. It was a souvenir hunt that went very wrong.

I have been thinking about the subject of souvenirs a lot while writing my latest novel, The Figurine, which is about an archaeological find removed from a dig and illicitly sold. Ancient objects, wherever they are found and whatever their size, are part of a bigger story, part of a nation’s culture, and taking them out of their context reduces their meaning and importance.

A memory is something you carry in your mind, not in your hand-luggage

Once a year, when I am in Crete, I swim half an hour out to sea to reach a tiny uninhabited island where an archaeological dig is taking place. Remains going back to 3000BC have been found there and, lying on the ground and spread along the walls, are dozens of fragments of pots, handles from huge wine jugs and daintily fashioned rims of bowls. Sizeable pieces are kept in the tiny unlocked chapel on the island. These are all wondrous ancient things, that will be used to draw conclusions about who lived there, where they sourced their materials, and other conclusions about their civilisation. To take even a tiny piece of this would be to remove a vital part – and the trust of the archaeologists that nobody will do this is touching. If, like me, you’re a jigsaw fan, you will know how upsetting it is to do a 500-piece puzzle and realise at the end that one piece, a single piece, is missing from the middle, lost somewhere under a rug or swallowed by the vacuum cleaner. That image will never, ever be completed. It’s a hole, with a picture around it. That’s all you see.

The arrival in the 19th century of steam and rail brought mass tourism across Europe and a souvenir industry that has burgeoned ever since. Even a quick trip to France will encourage us to bring back a model of the Eiffel Tower (usually made in China). It is actually quite hard to resist the lure of a rack of tat and I am rarely able to, especially if a monument has been fashioned into something I persuade myself is “useful”, like a salt cellar or a key ring. My house is littered with distinctly pointless objects.

Victoria has campaigned for the Parthenon Marbles to be returned to their rightful home (The British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures)

In French, the word souvenir simply means “a memory”, from the Latin subvenire, meaning “occurs to the mind”. It has nothing to do with a physical object; almost the opposite. A memory is something you carry in your mind, not in your hand-luggage. Reminded of this, I have just dropped a small copy of Michelangelo’s David into the bin, suddenly realising how silly it looked on the mantelpiece. To “remember” and to “possess” are two very different things. I wish Elgin and others like him who freely looted another nation’s heritage had known that.

Victoria Hislop’s new novel, ‘The Figurine’, is published by Headline Books