Casting Stones Over a Piece of Marble

Connie Mourtoupalas sat in her office in the Greek Embassy, showing off the chunk of white marble.

It had arrived in the mail, she explained, accompanied by a brief note from an apologetic son who felt guilty that his father might have stolen a piece of her country’s heritage years ago.

Mourtoupalas, the embassy’s cultural attache, was explaining this in the low, measured tone of a diplomat, but there was no mistaking her excitement about what had landed in her lap. By coincidence, someone else had also mailed items to the embassy, saying they had been taken from her homeland. In a few days, the marble and other items would be headed back to Greece for authentication. Back home, the Greek minister of culture was issuing a press release about the items’ return.

“When I first saw this and I touched it--you get an overwhelming sense of connection,” Mourtoupalas said. From its color, she speculated, it could be from the Theater of Dionysus at the foot of the Acropolis.

“They are part of our psyche,” Mourtoupalas said of the ruins that dominate the Athens landscape.

But things are never so simple.

Greek mythology is full of tales of father-son strife.

Zeus did in Cronus.

And Oedipus--who could forget the cursed son who killed his father and married his mother?

Dirk Wright, a 41-year-old civil servant from Fredericksburg, Va., is no Oedipus or Zeus, but he’s not shy when it comes to talking about family woe.

It was Wright who several months ago called Mourtoupalas, then sent her the marble with a note: “This piece of marble was removed from the amphitheater in Athens in approximately 1970. My father was on a ‘Med Tour’ [Mediterranean tour] with the U.S. Navy at the time. He picked it up while touring Athens. I don’t know anything else about it. Sorry.”

Says Wright now of his father, “He just picked up this hunk of marble and brought it home. I said, ‘They probably want it back.”’

Mourtoupalas didn’t ask many questions. The father, she thought, must be deceased. How noble it was of a son to want to return such a treasure.

But Fred Wright is far from dead. The retired Navy master chief petty officer is living in Virginia Beach, with his new wife and without the marble he picked up so long ago.

What Dirk Wright did not tell Mourtoupalas was that he had picked up the marble--from his father’s house without his father’s permission, along with a Scottish model of the clipper Cutty Sark in a bottle, old family photos and a bag of his late mother’s jewelry.

He’d done this in a fit of anger two years ago, after learning that he and his brother had been written out of his parents’ will.

“I got mad and started grabbing stuff,” Wright says.

For 30 years he’d seen it, with its brown stains and green felt circles glued on the bottom, resting on a shelf in his family’s living room. He had a vague childhood memory of hearing a story that his father had picked up the piece in Greece. It wasn’t until he was an adult that it all clicked, he says.

“Just imagine, if you’re out in Williamsburg and got these shards of pottery and got your bag and started filling it up and walked away with it,” Dirk Wright says.

So in his fury, snatching that marble seemed like a good move. He would return it to its rightful owners.

And the two years it took him to send it? He was afraid, he says, of what Greece might do to him. After all, it had been taken without permission. “I’m thinking to myself, I hope they don’t arrest me,” he says. “I didn’t know what to expect. I’m just glad to do a good deed.”

Dirk and Fred Wright haven’t spoken for years.

Ask father and son about the history of their divide and, as these family things go, the story is different depending on who’s doing the talking and the remembering.

Dirk Wright traces it back to Christmas 1990, when his parents came for a visit. Dirk asked his parents to stay at a hotel. He didn’t think it was a big deal at the time, he says, since “they showed up unannounced.”

Fred Wright remembers that Christmas, too, only he remembers that the trip was planned. Regardless, he says, that’s not the real problem anyway. “He thinks I’m an alcoholic, although I haven’t drunk in years,” Fred Wright says simply.

There was the time, he recalls, when he was in the hospital awaiting a liver transplant and Dirk came to visit. His son, he says, told him he’d brought the illness upon himself.

Dirk remembers being thrown out for no reason. “I didn’t say anything about blaming him” for the illness, he says.

But, Dirk adds, his father is right about one thing. “My father is an alcoholic,” he says.

Fred Wright says he and Dirk’s mother made a simple decision before she died of Alzheimer’s in 1997. “We decided they’re doing well, they don’t need anything from us,” he says of his children. It was settled: Everything but personal items would go to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

Dirk says he knew nothing about that decision until two years ago. He also doesn’t remember seeing anything about personal items. He was angry, he says, and fearfu that “as soon as [Fred] died, they’d just lock everything up.”

It was about 1970 or ‘71, Fred Wright says. As a Navy seaman he traveled the world for 26 years, so you’ll have to forgive him if he doesn’t remember the exact date he picked up that marble.

It was his habit to bring home souvenirs, like the ship he purchased in Scotland. The marble was another memento from his journeys.

“I never took a piece of marble from Athens,” he says. That marble isn’t even from Greece. He says he found it in a heap of rubble in Bodrum, Turkey, near the Aegean Sea.

“It was abandoned. I was wandering around the place. I came across this nice big Roman amphitheater, this decaying and decrepit amphitheater,” he says. “I picked it up and brought it home. I didn’t feel guilty about it. It was just a pile of rubble.”

Not quite, says Mourtoupalas.

It may not be the Elgin marbles--the pieces of the Parthenon that Scottish diplomat Lord Elgin bought from the occupying Turks in 1801, then later sold to the British Museum--but the stone is still a part of Greek culture, Mourtoupalas says.

“It’s still Greek, in the sense of ancient Greece,” she says. “We’re not really thinking in terms of countries, we’re thinking in terms of culture, and that is Greek culture.” That is why Mourtoupalas was so excited to get that marble as well as two other pieces she got from another repentant tourist: slivers of the Parthenon and fragments of urn from Delos.

Someone had gingerly mounted the Parthenon pieces onto small nails on a green felt background and then had them framed. Attached was a red plastic label: “Marble facing Parthenon, circa 400 BC.” The shards had also been mounted, on yellow felt, and held up by slender wires. The label: “Urn fragments, Delos, circa 500 BC.”

There’s not much monetary value to the items, Mourtoupalas says. But some things are more precious than money. “They are just important in the sense that they are part of a bigger picture,” she says. The pottery, for example, “looks fairly innocent and unimportant, but it can be a clue to a life that existed 2,500 years ago.”

If the marble really is from Turkey, she says, her country will “forward it to the appropriate [Turkish] agency.”

Fred Wright isn’t angry about what his son did. He would like his Cutty Sark back, though. He even sent a message to his son asking that it be returned. He and his new wife visited Scotland recently and the ship has renewed sentimental value.

“I wish he would talk to me,” he says of Dirk. “He’s still my son, and I still love him.” Fred and Dirk’s wife do talk from time to time, but Dirk isn’t budging.

“The feeling,” he says, “is not mutual.”