Tag: Archaeology

Turkey’s New Spin On Human Rights: They Can Be Used To Recover Art

BY Ceylan Yeginsu | January 14 2013 2:01 PM

Turkey is one of the world’s richest countries when it comes to archeology. Located at the crossroads of Europe and Asia and with a history of human habitation that dates back to the dawn of civilization, it’s especially rich in ancient Greek ruins that were created when the land that is now Turkey was known as Asia Minor, or Anatolia.

(Photo: Wikipedia)
A lion from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus in the British Museum

But many of those priceless relics aren’t in Turkey; they’re in Western museums. Now Turkey is trying a bold new tactic to recover them: It plans to use human rights law to get them back.

The country, which is usually divided on the sensitive issue of human rights enforcement, has found common ground as lawyers, civil society and the government gear up to file a lawsuit in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in an attempt to repatriate artifacts that are being housed at the British Museum.

The court, located in Strasbourg, France, normally tackles, as its name suggests, freedom of expression violations and torture cases. But Turkey will most likely put a unique spin on Article 1 of the First Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights, filing suit against the British Museum on the grounds that “Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions.”

This is yet another installment in Turkey’s campaign to restore its cultural heritage. Museums worldwide are being pressured by the country to return antiquities that once belonged to ancient Anatolia. The subjects of the most recent case are sculptures that once adorned the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, in the city that is now modern-day Bodrum.

“We are very grateful to the British Museum for housing these artifacts for all these years, but is it not natural for us to want them back? Is it not our right?” said lawyer Remzi Kazmaz, who joined forces with the Mugla Bar Association and the Turkish Ministry of Culture to bring the case to the attention of the ECHR.

“We may not have the best track record when it comes to preservation, but we now have the power to protect and facilitate these items,” Kazmaz added.

Kazmaz declined to comment on the measures that have been taken to carry the case to the ECHR, but he said that “all the appropriate steps have been taken and some 30 lawyers will act on behalf of the town of Bodrum in this case.” A petition with 118,000 signatures will also be presented to the court.

As Turkey prepares to file the case on Jan. 30, the British Museum says it has not been contacted directly regarding the lawsuit. “We have not heard anything directly about the legal case, other than via a media enquiry, so we can’t comment on it as we are not aware of the details,” said Olivia Rickman, press and PR manager of the museum.

According to Rickman, the sculptures from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus in the Museum’s collection were acquired in 1846, 1857 and 1859. “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 (1857 and 1859) and Bodrum Castle (1846) to the British Museum,” Rickman said.

“The Mausoleum of Halicarnassus is one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world and these pieces have been displayed at the British Museum in the context of presenting world cultures to a global audience,” she added.

Turkey, however, contests that the objects are in Britain legally. “The British Museum says [it has] permission, but [it does] not. There is no valid documentation,” Kazmaz said.

Charlotte Woodhead, an expert in cultural heritage law at the University of Warwick in England, is not aware of human rights legislation ever being used before to reclaim such objects. “If a claim is brought before the European Court of Human Rights, it will be interesting to see on what basis it is argued and also to see what the outcome is,” she said.

Besides using human rights legislation, Turkey has also turned to an Ottoman-era law banning the export of artifacts to threaten museums such as the Louvre in Paris, the Getty in Los Angeles and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which have been displaying ancient Anatolian artifacts for years.

“We are showing respect to history. We are not just asking for Ottoman or Seljuk artifacts; I am also laying claim to pieces from the Roman period or the pagan period. Why? Because we are aware that safeguarding your history, archeology and your museums is an element of development,” Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay told the Hurriyet Daily News last year.

He explained that Western museums have been criticizing Turkey for not knowing the value of these artifacts in the past, but that Turkey is now aware of their importance.

“There was a lack of awareness in the past. But today, the world has reached a certain level of development and we have caught up with that level of development, and we are now establishing museums above world standards,” he said.

Turkey’s Ministry of Culture has opened 10 new museums in the past five years, with an additional 19 projects underway. Excavation projects are also fully underway, and the results will be safeguarded in new exhibits within Turkish museums, according to the Ministry.

The ministry has not yet commented on the ECHR case, but according to Kazmaz, it has played a significant role in preparing the lawsuit. “We aren’t expecting the British Museum to just hand everything back, but we want to open a dialogue so we can at least be active in preserving these artifacts, whether it means we can jointly house them for 10 years at a time or longer. We are open to negotiation,” he said.

January 15, 2013
Hands-off style of exploring Istanbul is ancient history

ISTANBUL — That museum-schooled “look, don’t touch” detachment from the artifacts of history won’t get you anywhere in a place like Istanbul, an intricate, crafted quilt of multilayered pasts and a thronging, multicultural present.

The philosophy can’t help but be a little different here. The Turks know what the Romans know and what the citizens of any of the world’s ancient cities have long since figured out: Archaeology is everywhere, folks. Respect for the past can’t be allowed to get in the way of the working metropolis.

Istanbul is, indeed, the “Please Touch Museum” of archaeology.

My own introduction to this mind-set came as soon as we checked into our hotel. The Eresin Crown Hotel is an obscenely luxurious modern establishment located smack in the middle of the historic heart of Istanbul — in fact, on the very site of the Byzantine emperors’ Imperial Palace.

Like every other project in Istanbul, down to the most humble sewer repair, the Eresin Crown’s construction in the 1990s doubled as a serious archaeological dig. The results are on display for you to see. Many pieces of ancient Byzantium are behind glass in stately looking cases as you would expect, but many others simply stand around the main lobby and the ground-floor bar. I walked over and placed my hand on a sixth-century marble column, tracing my fingers over a low-relief cherub sculpted there millennia ago by some Greek artisan employed by a Caesar.

History in my hands. My Midwest museum-patron mind reeled.

Some days later, my daughter and I ventured out to the ancient land walls of Constantinople, breached by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 at one of history’s most fateful turning points. Destroyed and rebuilt at intervals over the centuries since, the walls are still there to see; the workaday Turks don’t take much notice of them. And indeed, our Istanbul-native guide had some difficulty figuring out how to even access them from the roaring superhighways that now crisscross the walls and trace their 1,600-year-old course.

As a first taste, we explored what remains of the Yedikule Fortress, a seven-towered medieval bastion anchoring the southern junction of ancient Constantinople’s land and sea walls in what is now the working-class Fatih neighborhood of Istanbul.

Built up over the centuries, this fortress marks the site of what was once the principal ceremonial entrance to the Byzantine Imperial City.

We decided to scale the parapets of one of the towers added a bit later by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in the 15th century.

That’s right. My teenage daughter and I took to the steep, centuries-old masonry steps and went to the rooftops.

This is technically a state-run museum, and there were a couple of sleepy attendants in a booth somewhere, but what we chose to do inside this otherwise deserted Byzantine-Ottoman fortress was no concern of theirs.

At the summit of the tower, I immediately made my way to one of the battlements and caught my breath at the astonishing view across the sprawling Istanbul skyline and the Sea of Marmara spread out before me.

My hand came to rest on the corner of one of the crenellations piercing the battlement wall. To my horror, the entire heavy block of centuries-old masonry shifted beneath my arm.

I peered down at the grassy area six or seven stories below me and noticed more than a few similar pieces of dislocated Ottoman-period masonry half buried there. One easy shove was all it would take — I would leave off studying the processes of history and, instead, for what would surely be one of the only times in my life, participate in them.

I carefully replaced the chunk of masonry and made sure it was secure.

History might lie in my hands, but after all, it was the respect and admiration for it that had brought me halfway around the world to the parapets of the Yedikule Fortress in the first place.

We resumed our survey of the fortress and the rest of the Walls of Constantinople, using, as our principal tools, our eyes — and of course our imaginations.

via Hands-off style of exploring Istanbul is ancient history (gallery) | cleveland.com.

December 22, 2012
Archaeologists Explore Site on Syria-Turkey Border

By Christopher Torchia

November 11, 2012 8:54AM

Despite the Syrian war, archaeologists are hard at work at the site of an ancient city called Karkemish. The strategic city’s historical importance is long known to scholars because of references in ancient texts. Despite the dangers, archaeologists say they felt secure during a 10-week season of excavation on the Turkish side of Karkemish.

Few archaeological sites seem as entwined with conflict, ancient and modern, as the city of Karkemish. The scene of a battle mentioned in the Bible, it lies smack on the border between Turkey and Syria, where civil war rages today. Twenty-first century Turkish sentries occupy an acropolis dating back more than 5,000 years, and the ruins were recently demined. Visible from crumbling, earthen ramparts, a Syrian rebel flag flies in a town that regime forces fled just months ago.

A Turkish-Italian team is conducting the most extensive excavations there in nearly a century, building on the work of British Museum teams that included T.E. Lawrence, the adventurer known as Lawrence of Arabia. The plan is to open the site along the Euphrates river to tourists in late 2014.

The strategic city, its importance long known to scholars because of references in ancient texts, was under the sway of Hittites and other imperial rulers and independent kings. However, archaeological investigation there was halted by World War I, and then by hostilities between Turkish nationalists and French colonizers from Syria who built machine gun nests in its ramparts. Part of the frontier was mined in the 1950s, and in later years, creating deadly obstacles to archaeological inquiry at a site symbolic of modern strife and intrigue.

via Archaeologists Explore Site on Syria-Turkey Border | Sci-Tech Today.

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November 12, 2012
Archaeology: Acropolis of forgotten kingdom uncovered

(ANSAmed) – ISTANBUL, FEBRUARY 10 – Numerous archaeological excavations are underway at a huge site in Anatolia which will uncover an ancient and rich yet forgotten kingdom known as Tuwana from the darkness of history, which will be featured in an open-air museum. The news was reported by Lorenzo d’Alfonso, an Italian archaeologist leading the joint mission by the University of Pavia and NYU, who provided details on the excavation campaign in a press conference in Istanbul this month, during which the details of the Italian archaeological missions in Turkey were explained. This “new discovery” from the pre-classical age which “needs to be continued” in southern Cappadocia took place in Kinik Hoyuk, the scholar said, referring to a site mainly involving the beginning of the first millennium BC. The area is “fully” part of the “forgotten kingdom” of Tuwana, said d’Alfonso, known until now through hieroglyphics and from several sources from the Assyrian Empire, but “never studied archaeologically”: “A completely intact site that has been left untouched”, trying to “place it historically to understand which civilisation it belonged to and what it’s role was in the region”. Kinik Hoyuk, the archaeologist said, is “one of the major sites” in terms of size in pre-classical Anatolia, if you leave the capital of the Hittites out: the most conservative estimates say that it spans 24 hectares “but topographers say that it could cover 81 hectares”. “A completely new mission” is working here, jointly began last year by the University of Pavia and NYU, which began collaborating with Turkish universities such as Erzurum and Nigde. “The site was uncovered by excavations conducted by several colleagues, but its importance emerged in a campaign that we conducted,” said d’Alfonso, who said that “southern Cappadocia is important because it controlled the Cilician Gates, or the passageway between the East and the West and between Europe and Asia”: essentially, “one of the most important junctions” in the world during that period and at the “centre” of which lies Kinik Koyuk. Tuwana was a small buffer state between the Phrygian kingdom and the Assyrian Empire “and this is why it was particularly rich”: “one of the great subjects of our study involves the cultural richness of this kingdom,” said D’Alfonso, referring mainly to the development of the alphabet. He pointed out that three steles from the Iron Age were uncovered in the area, “which are not very well preserved”, but which do say a lot “about the importance that the site had”. The strategy of the excavation, said the archaeologist, was guided by “geomagnetic surveys in 2010 which revealed particularly significant remains of the acropolis wall and buildings at the centre of the acropolis itself”: “monumental” walls excavated “to a height of 6 metres” in an outstanding state of preservation (or at least which “are not easily comparable to other pre-classical sites in Anatolia, particularly the central region”). “Original plaster was found” on the walls and we are planning on reinforcing it before restorations take place” starting next year. The excavation campaign was “planned from the very beginning to be transformed into an open-air museum”: Kinik Hoyuk, underlined D’Alfonso, is “easily accessible”. Its “strength” is that it is only 45 minutes from the major tourist attractions in Cappadocia (and less than 2km from one of the major 4-lane roads in the region).

It is in the heart of a tourist route which is among the most important in Turkey, and therefore, the archaeologist said, the local government “fully supports the mission, seeing great possibilities for development in it”. (ANSAmed).

February 11, 2012