Tales from the Vitrine: Battles Over Stolen Antiquities
By Britt Peterson

Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
by Sharon Waxman
Buy this book

Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage
by James Cuno
Buy this book

Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq's Past
by Geoff Emberling and Katharyn Hanson, eds.
Buy this book

Thieves of Baghdad: One Marine's Passion to Recover the World's
Greatest Stolen Treasures
by Matthew Bogdanos, with William Patrick
Buy this book


This article appeared in the January 26, 2009 edition of The Nation.
January 7, 2009

Sharon Waxman
A counterfeit hippocampus on display in Usak, Turkey

On a 1984 visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Turkish
journalist named Ozgen Acar noticed a group of fifty artifacts labeled
"East Greek treasure" that resembled a collection that had gone
missing some twenty years before. The treasure, Acar suspected, had
been snatched by grave robbers from Sardis, an ancient city in western
Turkey, which served as the capital of the Lydian empire at its peak
in the sixth and seventh centuries BC. (Herodotus tells us that its
last king, the affluent Croesus, was the first person to mint coins of
pure silver and gold, hence the saying "as rich as Croesus.") Acar,
who had spent the previous decade tracking antiquities looters in the
small towns surrounding Sardis, took his suspicions to the Turkish
Ministry of Education. It turned out that the Lydian Hoard had passed
through a number of smugglers and semireputable dealers before
reaching the Met in the 1960s, and there was plenty of evidence that
the Met had known something of the provenance of the objects at the
time and willfully ignored it. The Turkish government sued the Met for
the unconditional return of the cache and, after a six-year legal
battle, finally won. In 1995 the Lydian Hoard was returned to the
small town of Usak, in Sardis, sparking an outpouring of national
pride and a flurry of copycat lawsuits.


Britt Peterson: How powerful museums and private collectors act
as stewards and looters of the world's cultural treasures.

The celebrations were to be short-lived. Unlike in other "source
countries" such as Greece, Italy and Egypt, the people of Turkey are
the product of successive invasions and migrations. Modern Turks, who
are primarily descended from thirteenth-century Ottoman conquerors,
have little in common, ethnically or culturally, with the Trojans,
Lydians and Mycenaeans of the distant past. Perhaps not surprisingly,
then, Turks have been most eager to tour attractions that showcase
relics of their Muslim heritage, such as the Hagia Sophia, a Byzantine
basilica later converted into a mosque, and Topkapi Palace, once home
to the Ottoman sultans and the present custodian of their crown
jewels. These sites each host about a million visitors every year,
making them the two most popular attractions in Istanbul. Compare this
with the little museum in Usak, which received exactly 769 visitors
between 2001 and 2006, a number that failed to impress the Hoard's
previous stewards: the number of people "who've visited those
treasures in Turkey," sniffed a museum spokesman, "is roughly equal to
one hour's worth of visitors at the Met."

At that time, the Usak museum was so poorly appointed that its lone
security guard doubled as the ticket taker. The vitrines holding the
objects were barely protected; there was no alarm system, and the lock
was the sort one can pick with a hairpin. In 2005 officials were
forced to admit that several pieces had corroded since arriving in
Turkey; the Usak museum lacked sufficient funds to care for them properly.

So it should have come as no shock when, in April 2006, the highlight
of the Hoard, a golden hippocampus (sea horse) much beloved by
tourists and locals alike, was revealed to have been stolen. At almost
twice the weight of the original, the hippocampus that was--and
remains--on display was an obvious fake. Kazim Akbiyikoglu, the
museum's curator and Acar's old friend and ally, was fingered as the
thief. Acar, who had by then devoted twenty years of his life to
winning back the Hoard, was devastated.

rest at

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090126/peterson