Secret flight path of the Parthenon statue

When the British Museum in London lent a Parthenon sculpture to the State Hermitage Museum to mark the Russian institution’s 250th birthday in late 2014, there were fears that Greece might try to seize the statue en route to St Petersburg. To prevent this, the loan was shrouded in secrecy until the sculpture of the river god Ilissos went on show in the Hermitage (6 December 2014-18 January 2015). The Art Newspaper has learned that the route it took was designed to avoid European Unio