Tag: Antiquities

Turkey vs. The Louvre: Ankara Renews Its Quest To Recover Antiquities

Reuniting the bust of Hercules with its body was one of the Culture Ministry’s great successes – (Wikimedia / Worldcrunch montage)

By Guillaume Perrier

LE MONDE/Worldcrunch

ISTANBUL – The treasure of Troy is back. The collection of golden jewelry from the ancient city, which had been stolen during the 19th century, was handed back to Turkey by the University of Pennsylvania last September.

The precious jewelry – known as the “Troy gold” – had been looted after the first excavations of Troy by a German archeologist in the 1870s. No one knows if Helen of Troy actually wore the jewels, but Turkey says it belongs to them. “It is only right that they be returned to where they were taken from,” declared Minister of Culture and Tourism Ertugrul Gunay.

These jewels are now set to be displayed in Ankara.

In December, the great Istanbul Archaeology Museum celebrated the return of a mosaic from 194 A.D., depicting Orpheus playing the lyre to calm wild animals. It was stolen in 1998 in Urfa (in ancient times Edessa), near the Syrian border. The mosaic had been auctioned at Christie’s in New York, and bought by the Dallas Art Museum for $85,000.

With those wonders from Asia Minor (current Turkey) more than 3,700 artifacts – statues, frescos, pots, tools and coins – have been recovered since 2007, thanks to an unprecedented campaign led by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

The 3,000 year-old Hattusa sphinx, removed from the Hittite imperial city located in the middle of Anatolia, which was on display at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, also made the trip home recently.

But the most spectacular restitution was a bust of Hercules, handed back by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was stolen in 1980 on the site of Perga and sold the next year to the American museum. The bust flew back to Turkey on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plane – who was returning home after the 2011 UN general assembly.

“Turkey had been campaigning for the marble’s return for the past two decades,” he declared, triumphant, as he landed in Ankara. The bust of Hercules could finally be reunited with the rest of his body, on display at the Antalya Museum in southwestern Turkey.

Challenging the museums in court

The Turkish government’s decades-long struggle to recover stolen artifacts has brought a certain number of museums to their knees. But other museums believe the artifacts belong to them, and are refusing to negotiate. This is the case of Paris’ Louvre Museum, whose Islamic wing holds a wall of Ottoman Iznik ceramic tites that Ankara says were stolen from the Istanbul Piyale Pacha Mosque by a French collector. But the Parisian museum argues the tiles were acquired legally.

The Louvre also has 16th century ceramic tiles that were taken from Sultan Selim II’s tomb in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. However, the UNESCO convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property was signed in 1970 and doesn’t apply to acquisitions made before that date.

This argument is inconceivable for Murat Suslu, the director of museums for the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism: “What if the Turks came, took a stained glass window from Notre-Dame in the 19th century to renovate it and now refused to give it back?”

Priam’s treasure remains on display at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. To get uncooperative countries to hand back their ancient artifacts, Turkey doesn’t hesitate to threaten them with cancelling archeological concessions (especially Germany and France), something these countries call tantamount to blackmail.

Turkey has also tried going to court to get its artifacts back. An Istanbul lawyer recently filed a claim with the European Court of Human Rights, in a bid to recover statues taken from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and currently on display at the British Museum.

Read the article in the original language.

Photo by – Wikimedia / Worldcrunch montage

All rights reserved ©Worldcrunch – in partnership with LE MONDE

Crunched by: Leo Tilmont

via Turkey vs. The Louvre: Ankara Renews Its Quest To Recover Antiquities – All News Is Global |.

February 19, 2013
Turkey earns $160 mln from visits to historical objects

Baku. Shamil Alibayli – APA. Aya Sofya Mosque in Turkey was the most interesting place for tourists last year.

According to APA, 3,345,347 tourists visited Aya Sofya Mosque last year. The second interesting place was Topkapi Palace (3,334,925 visitors). The third place was held by demolitions of Ephesus (1,888,172 visitors). In general, 28,781,308 tourists visited demolitions and museums of this ancient city last year.

Turkey earned $160 mln from the visits to historical objects in 2012.

via APA – Turkey earns $160 mln from visits to historical objects.

January 27, 2013
Turkey: 4 Arrested Trying to Sell Stolen Torah Scroll

Turkish police reported, Sunday, that they arrested four youths who tried to sell a stolen 500-year-old Torah to a local merchant. The merchant was suspicious when the youths told him the book was 2,000 years old and called the police, who arrested the youths after faking negotiations.

Under interrogation, the youths said they had no idea it was a Torah scroll and were told about the book by their geography teacher. It was not known where the scroll came from. The police sent it for examination and to try to trace the owner.

via Turkey: 4 Arrested Trying to Sell Stolen Torah Scroll – Latest News Briefs – Israel National News.

January 2, 2013
Turkey to push for return of ‘stolen’ artefacts

Western museums are in a “panic” over the repatriation of “stolen” artefacts to Turkey, the country’s Culture and Tourism Minister Ertugrul Gunay has said, adding that he hopes regional neighbours also reclaim their ancient treasures.

Turkey will continue putting pressure on museums, especially many in Western Europe, to return the country’s illegally removed ancient treasures, Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay has warned.

Gunay told the Hurriyet Daily News that Ankara’s new art repatriation policy has caused “panic” among Western museums, but that the effort had been largely successful and would continue. He added that the he hoped Greece, Iraq and Syria would also act to recover “stolen” art.

via Turkey to push for return of ‘stolen’ artefacts – FRANCE 24.

December 26, 2012
Turkey turns to human rights law to reclaim British Museum sculptures

Campaigners are going to European court in attempt to repatriate artefacts created for the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus

Dalya Alberge

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 8 December 2012 19.29 GMT

Mausoleum of Halicarnassus

Two marble statues from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. Photograph: The Trustees of the British Museum

Human rights legislation that has overturned the convictions of terrorists and rapists could now rob the British Museum of sculptures created for one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

A Turkish challenge in the European court of human rights will be a test case for the repatriation of art from one nation to another, a potential disaster for the world’s museums.

Despite criticism of their own country’s human rights record, Turkish campaigners are turning to human rights law – a dramatic move to reclaim sculptures that once adorned the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, an ancient wonder along with sites such as the hanging gardens of Babylon and Egypt’s pyramids.

Greek sculptors in 350BC created a 40-metre-high monument, crowned by a colossal four-horse chariot on a stepped pyramid. A magnificent horse’s head is among sculptures acquired by the British Museum in the mid-19th century, which campaigners want returned to their original site – Bodrum in south-west Turkey.

An Istanbul lawyer, Remzi Kazmaz, told the Observer that a lawsuit will be filed at the European court on 30 January and that 30 lawyers are acting on behalf of the town of Bodrum as well as district and provincial governors, the Turkish ministry of culture and other bodies.

Kazmaz said: “We thank the British authorities and the British Museum for accommodating and preserving our historical and cultural heritage for the last years. However, the time has come for these assets to be returned to their place of origin … Preparations for formal requests are taking place now.”

A petition with 118,000 signatures has been organised and the Strasbourg court will be shown a documentary on how Turkey lost its ancient treasure.

Kazmaz said: “We do not believe that the artefacts were removed legally.”

But he declined to elaborate on the planned legal arguments: “The lawsuit is a sensitive subject so, while I can confirm that the information you have is correct, we have to be understandably cautious”.

Gwendolen Morgan, a human rights lawyer with Bindmans LLP, suggested that “the most likely line of attack” will be a breach by the UK of article 1, 1st protocol of the European convention of human rights, which states: “Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions.”

She said: “I suspect they’ll use the litigation to ramp up the moral pressure on the British government … So it’s quite a powerful campaigning tool … How this case will be interpreted by the European court of human rights will also be informed by the domestic law in force in the 1850s in the Ottoman empire when the mausoleum was taken by the British Museum.”

She joked: “I must go to the British Museum again soon before they [the sculptures] vanish.”

Norman Palmer, a leading QC specialising in cultural property law, said: “I have not heard of it [human rights] being used to raise a claim for the specific restitution of particular tangible objects … This would be a novel claim.”

The case will be keenly watched by Greece, which is seeking the return of the Parthenon marbles, and Nigeria, which wants the Benin bronzes back, and other nations seeking the repatriation of cultural artefacts.

A senior source in Greece said: “Greece will be following this with interest.”

The mausoleum – built for Mausolus, king of Caria – is believed to have collapsed after a medieval earthquake. Some of its sculptures were taken by crusaders to their castle at Bodrum, from where they were recovered in 1846 by the British smbassador at Constantinople and presented to the British Museum. Others were retrieved in the 1850s during site excavations by the museum.

A British Museum spokeswoman said: “We have not heard anything about the legal case … so we can’t comment.” But, she added: “These pieces were acquired during the course of two British initiatives, both with firmans – legal permits issued by the Ottoman authorities – that granted permission for the excavation of the site and removal of the material from the site … to the British Museum.”

Turkey is also pursuing claims against other institutions worldwide, including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

via Turkey turns to human rights law to reclaim British Museum sculptures | Culture | guardian.co.uk.

December 9, 2012
Dallas Museum Volunteers to Return Mosaic to Turkey – NYTimes.com

Dallas Museum Volunteers to Return Mosaic to Turkey

By RANDY KENNEDY

The mosaic is to be returned to Turkey.Dallas Museum of Art The mosaic is to be returned to Turkey.

The Dallas Museum of Art voluntarily returned an ancient marble mosaic in its collection to Turkey on Monday, after determining that the work — which dates from A.D. 194 and shows Orpheus taming animals with his lyre — was probably stolen years ago from a Turkish archaeological site.

The decision, part of a new plan by the museum to court exchange agreements with foreign institutions more actively, comes at a time when the Turkish government has become more aggressive in seeking antiquities it believes were looted from its soil. In recent months it has pressed the Metropolitan Museum of Art and several other museums around the world to return objects and, to increase its leverage, it has refused loan requests to some.

The Met says that the objects sought by Turkey were legally acquired in the European antiquities market in the 1960s before being donated to the museum in 1989.

Other museums have accused Turkey of undue intimidation. Last year the Pergamon Museum in Berlin returned a 3,000-year-old sphinx, which Turkey said had been taken to Germany for restoration in 1917. But German officials say Turkey has continued to deny loans of objects for exhibitions because of claims to other objects in the Pergamon collection.

The Dallas mosaic, bought at auction at Christie’s in 1999 for $85,000, is thought to have once decorated the floor of a Roman building near Edessa, in what is now the area around the city of Sanliurfa in southeastern Turkey. Edessa developed alliances with Rome from the time of Pompey and was sacked under the rule of the emperor Trajan.

Maxwell L. Anderson, the director of the museum in Dallas, said that when he took over at the beginning of 2012, he asked antiquities curators to identify objects that might have provenance problems.

“What I didn’t want to happen here was a succession of slow-motion claims coming at us,” he said in an interview. As part of the review, the museum has also transferred legal ownership of several objects to Italy, including a pair of Etruscan shields and three kraters, or earthenware vessels used to mix wine and water.

Turkish officials had been searching for the Orpheus mosaic for some time, Mr. Anderson said. “For whatever reason, they hadn’t found their way to the Christie’s catalog or to us,” he said.

When the museum contacted Turkey earlier this year to say that it had doubts about the mosaic, whose existence seems not to have been cited in publications before its inclusion in the Christie’s catalog, Turkish officials provided photographs of a looted site near Edessa whose physical characteristics closely matched those of the mosaic.

“I saw that, and even as a novice, I said: ‘Done,’ ” Mr. Anderson said.

Cemalettin Aydin, the consul general of Turkey in Houston, who along with other Turkish officials took possession of the mosaic at a ceremony in Dallas on Monday morning, said in prepared remarks that he applauded the museum’s “unwavering ethical stance.” He added that the restitution would lead to an active loan arrangement between Turkey and the Dallas museum. The museum has no Anatolian collection to speak of, and so the hope is that the agreement with Turkey will allow Dallas to organize ambitious exhibitions of work lent from that region.

The return of the mosaic is the first official act of the museum’s new international loan initiative, called DMX, which seeks agreements with foreign museums to share objects and to collaborate on conservation projects, exhibitions and educational programs.

A version of this article appeared in print on 12/04/2012, on page C1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Dallas Museum Returns Art to Turkey.

via Dallas Museum Volunteers to Return Mosaic to Turkey – NYTimes.com.

December 5, 2012