US actor George Clooney and British lawyer Amal Alamuddin leave the palazzo Ca Farsetti on a taxi boat on September 29, 2014 in Venice.

London Mayor Boris Johnson on Monday mocked George Clooney over his call to return the Greek Elgin marbles from the British capital to “the Pantheon” – a temple in Rome that the U.S. actor this year referred to this year instead of Greece’s Parthenon.

“Even in England the polling is in favour of returning the marbles from the Pantheon,” Clooney said in a press conference earlier this year, before calling them the “Pantheon Marbles” again.

Clooney’s wife Amal is currently advising the Greek government on how to get the marbles returned to Athens.

In his column in The Telegraph, Johnson praised the “British Museum’s freedom to loan [part of the marbles] to Russia — even in this wretched period”.

He said: “That is why good old George Clooney is so wrong in his plan to restore the marbles to the ‘Pantheon,’ as he puts it.”

The Elgin Marbles are a set of ancient Greek sculptures taken to London after being removed from the Acropolis in Athens by a British aristocrat, Lord Elgin, while Athens was under Ottoman control in the 19th Century. Greece has sought their return from the British Museum for decades, to no avail.

The Trustees of the British Museum maintain that the marbles legally belong to the museum. Greece says it is no longer an issue of ownership and that it would accept them back as a permanent loan.

To do so, the Greek government would first have to relinquish its claim to them, the British Museum says.

 
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