‘Moved’ by Greece's quest to reacquire ‘stolen sculptures of the Parthenon,’ a Chilean engineer brought a marble to officials; archaeologists find it belonged to an even older temple razed by Persians

A 77-year-old Chilean engineer from the southern town of Villarrica, Enrico Tosti-Croce was well aware of the fact that his father, while serving the Italian Navy, visited theAcropolis of Athens in the 1930s and found a piece of marble on the ground of the Parthenon, the ancient temple built for the goddess Athena in the fifth century B.C.E.

In the 1950s, to set up a mechanical engineering firm, his father, Gaetano Tosti-Croce, immigrated to Chile’s coastal city of Viña del Mar, and among his belongings, he had the lotus-flower-carved piece of stone.

The marble piece was three inches tall and four and a half inches wide and weighed little over two and a half pounds. It was “just another ornament,” Enrico told El País’ Antonia Laborde on September last year, and his father’s “piece of the Parthenon” occupied a shelf in their dining room.


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While dividing the belongings of their parents after their death in 1994, Enrico got hold of this piece of marble and eventually bought it home in Villarrica. “When someone came to my house for the first time, I would show them that stone and say, ‘This is from the Parthenon,’” Tosti-Croce told the Art Newspaper last year. “Some believed me; others didn't,” he added.

Greek vs UK on Parthenon marbles

There is a long disagreement between the UK and Greece about the ownership of marble sculptures, and the Greek government has been trying to bring back the Parthenon Marbles since the 1980s from the British Museum’s collection of marble sculptures from the Acropolis.

In the UK, it is known as the Elgin Marbles, named after Lord Elgin, who had them removed from a temple in Greece. “Lord Elgin used illicit and inequitable means to seize and export the Parthenon sculptures, without real legal permission to do so, in a blatant act of serial theft,” Greek Culture Minister Lina Mendoni said in a statement to the Guardian in 2022.

When Tosti-Croce heard that Greece was demanding “the stolen sculptures of the Parthenon” from the United Kingdom, he thought: “Wow, I have a little piece of the Parthenon. I think it’s time to give it back,” he told EL PAÍS.

The Chilean engineer returned it to Greek embassy

Then he contacted the Greek embassy in Chile to return it. In a translated statement, the Greek ministry of culture wrote in July last year, “moved, as he said, by our country’s just struggle to recover the Parthenon Sculptures from the British Museum.”

Tosti-Croce brought the marble piece to the Greek embassy in Santiago in late March of 2025. Upon more examination, the “sacred” rock was found to be older than the Parthenon.

“Its examination led to its attribution to an archaic temple founded on the sacred rock of the Acropolis of Athens. Probably the Hekatompedon, as mentioned in ancient inscriptions, which was erected during the reign of Peisistratus, around 570-550 BC,” the Greek Ministry of Culture wrote in the July statement.

Parthenon marbles was from older temple

“It turned out the piece wasn’t from the Parthenon, but from an even older temple,” Tosti-Croce tells the Art Newspaper. When asked how he felt after returning it, Enrico told the Art Newspaper that, “I felt a special kind of satisfaction. I don’t even know how to describe it. … I felt like I had done something good.”

A few months later, director of the Greek Archaeological Service, Olympia Vikatou, sent Tosti-Croce a letter thanking him for his generous gesture, with some unknown details of the rock kept in their dining hall: “It is part of the marble gutter of an archaic temple, probably the Hekatompedon, the first monumental temple on the Acropolis, founded in the first half of the 6th century BC, during the time of Pisistratus,” as quoted by EL PAÍS.

The gutter was made out of marble quarried from the hills of Mount Hymettus, which is situated south of Athens, and was decorated with alternating oval palmettes and lotus flowers. “It comes from the sacred rock of the Acropolis, a unique monumental symbol that has suffered greatly from systematic looting over time,” the media channel quoted the director of the Greek Archaeological Service, who also reportedly noted in the letter, hinting at Britain, that she hopes others would follow his example.

“Archaeologists concluded that it wasn’t from the Parthenon, which dates from the 5th century BC, the Classical period, but even older, from the Hekatompedon, in the 6th century BC, the Archaic period,” Theodosios Theos, the Deputy Chief of Mission at the Greek Embassy in Chile, told the outlet.

“That temple was destroyed by the Persians. Some of its fragments are in the Acropolis Museum in Athens,” he added.