Stepping back from a fight with Britain over ownership of the so-called Elgin marbles, the Greek culture minister has declared that Athens will not pursue legal action to settle the bitter, decades-old dispute, despite the advice of international lawyers.
The move comes after a team of human rights lawyers in London, including Amal Clooney, told Greece in a 150-page report this week that suing the British government would offer the best chance of retrieving the sculptures if Britain rejected additional formal Greek requests to return them.
But the culture minister, Nikos Xydakis, suggested that the path of litigation was fraught with peril. “You cannot go to court over every issue,” he said on Wednesday in an interview on Greek television. “Besides, in international courts, the outcome is uncertain.”
Instead, Mr. Xydakis said, he viewed the best means of securing the Elgin marbles as being through diplomacy. “The road to reclaiming the return of the sculptures is diplomatic and political,” he said.
For decades, the Greek and British authorities have fought over the collection of sculptures and artifacts obtained in Athens by Lord Elgin, a British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, in the early 19th century. The British Parliament bought the collection in 1816 and presented it to the British Museum.
The collection includes many pieces from the Parthenon, some of which Lord Elgin is said to have asked to be sawed off so that he could decorate his mansion in Scotland. He later sold the pieces to pay off debts.
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Britain says that Lord Elgin saved the Elgin marbles from destruction and acquired them fairly. Greece says the collection was looted.
The dispute has intensified in recent months, after the British Museum in December lent a sculpture of the Greek river god Ilissos, a reclining male figure, to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, announcing the loan only after the artifact had arrived in Russia.
The Greek prime minister at the time, Antonis Samaras — who had earlier commissioned Ms. Clooney’s law firm to explore legal options — called the move an “affront to the Greek people.” But the Greek government said it would wait for possible talks between Unesco and Britain before deciding on a course of action, as the United Nations cultural agency offered to act as a mediator.
After declining several times to respond to Unesco’s offer of mediation, Richard Lambert, chairman of the board of trustees of the British Museum, told the Greek government in April that its trustees had decided to “respectfully decline this request,” drawing more outrage in Athens.
“The British negativism is overwhelming, along with its lack of respect for the role of mediators,” Mr. Xydakis said in a statement.
Doughty Street Chambers, the British law firm that is advising the Greek government, urged Athens to pursue legal channels as quickly as possible, describing the “now or never” opportunity with a groundswell of support from celebrities, including Ms. Clooney’s husband, the actor George Clooney, and cultural activist groups.
Dimitrios Pandermalis, the president of the Acropolis Museum, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that his priority was to unify the marbles in the British Museum collection with the pieces that had remained in Greece. Although Britain had long argued that Greece is not able to care for the artifacts, the inauguration of a modern museum at the foot of the Acropolis in 2009 was intended as a state-of-the-art rebuttal.
“The museum is trying to promote not only the issue of the problems of the marbles, but their meaning for modern society,” Mr. Pandermalis said. “Over time, the whole thing becomes a symbol of something, and symbols are very dangerous thing. It’s important to understand why the sculptures should be reunited — it’s worth it for the world community to see marbles unified.”