A top-floor gallery in the Acropolis Museum sits empty.
It is intended to house the Elgin Marbles, a collection of ancient Greek sculptures originally crafted for the Parthenon.
The problem?
These sculptures no longer "belong" to Greece.
In the 19th century, an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire shipped the marbles home to Great Britain — where, after hundreds of years and multiple demands from Greece for the statues' return — they still remain.
The Elgin Marbles are just one example of a request for repatriation.
Around the world, there are hundreds of thousands more that don't get attention.
Repatriation is the act or process of returning human remains and cultural items to Native American tribes, other communities, perhaps a nation-state.
There's two aspects to repatriation, the legal transfer of "ownership" and the physical return of the human remains or cultural items.
Multiple reasons underlie repatriation claims.
