A Man Brought His Father’s ‘Piece of the Parthenon’ to Greek Officials. They Said It Was From an Even Older Temple in the Acropolis of Athens

The engraved marble fragment likely came from an archaic temple called the Hekatompedon, making it around 2,600 years old

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

November 5, 2025

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When 77-year-old Chilean engineer Enrico Tosti-Croce heard on the radio that Greece was fighting for marble sculptures from the Acropolis of Athens to be returned, he knew what he had to do.

“When I heard the news, I said, ‘Wow, I have a little piece of the Parthenon,’” Tosti-Croce tells the Art Newspaper’s Graciela Ibáñez. “It’s my responsibility to return it.”

Tosti-Croce’s father was Gaetano Tosti-Croce, an Italian submarine engineer who fought in World War II. Back in 1930, Gaetano visited Athens with the Italian Navy. And at the Acropolis—the Greek capital’s hilltop covered in ancient architecture—he picked up a small piece of carved marble near the base of the Parthenon, a temple built for the goddess Athena in the fifth century B.C.E.

The marble fragment weighs more than two and a half pounds. It’s about three inches tall and four and a half inches wide, engraved with part of a lotus flower. Gaetano brought it home, and when he and his family immigrated to Viña del Mar, Chile, after the war, the marble came with them. Tosti-Croce tells El País’ Antonia Laborde that his father’s “piece of the Parthenon” occupied a shelf in their dining room: “just another ornament.”

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When Tosti-Croce’s parents died in 1994, he inherited the artifact, eventually bringing it to his home in Villarrica, Chile. “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 tells the Art Newspaper. “Some believed me; others didn't.”

Since the 1980s, the Greek government has been trying to reacquire the British Museum’s collection of marble sculptures from the Acropolis. Also known as the Parthenon Marbles, the Elgin Marbles are a group of relief panels, statues and frieze fragments from the Parthenon building, dating back to the fifth century B.C.E. In the early 19th century, when Athens was still part of the Ottoman Empire, the British ambassador to the empire, Lord Elgin, harvested the marbles and took them to the United Kingdom.

“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 in 2022, per the Guardian’s Helena Smith.

Moved by Greece’s efforts to reclaim its historical property, Tosti-Croce reached out to the Greek Embassy in Chile last January, according to a translated statement from the Greek Ministry of Culture. He emailed the embassy’s deputy chief of mission, Theodosios Theos, claiming to have a piece of the Parthenon, then sent images and details, per El País. In late March, Tosti-Croce brought the marble piece to the embassy in Santiago.

Months later, he received a letter from the director of the Greek Archaeological Service, Olympia Vikatou. She thanked him and offered details about the marble piece: Archaeologists think it was likely part of a cistern, or gutter, on the Hekatompedon—the Acropolis’ oldest monumental temple, built around 570 B.C.E. during Greece’s Archaic period. According to El País, Vikatou noted that the temple’s gutter was decorated with alternating oval palmettes and lotus flowers.

“It turned out the piece wasn’t from the Parthenon, but from an even older temple,” Tosti-Croce tells the Art Newspaper.

According to the statement, the artifact has been given to the Ephorate of Antiquities of the City of Athens. Theos hopes the return “can be an example of honor and courage for other citizens in Chile or abroad to do the same,” he tells El País.

Tosti-Croce tells the Art Newspaper that when he left the embassy after handing over his father’s marble collectible, “I felt a special kind of satisfaction. I don’t even know how to describe it. … I felt like I had done something good.”

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.