Reflecting rising stress by New York prosecutors on museums and personal collectors, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, the Virginia Museum of Advantageous Arts, and an American collector have returned dozens of looted antiquities to Turkey. As reported by the New York Times, a repatriation ceremony was held in New York on December 8.
The repatriations are linked to a years-long investigation into antiquities trafficking networks by the Manhattan District Attorney’s workplace’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. The objects returned on December 8 had been all linked to plundered archeological sites in Turkey; according to the DA’s office, the objects had been stolen from these websites after which exhibited and bought by sellers utilizing faked provenance data.
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The objects included a 2nd-century marble head of Greek orator Demosthenes from the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork; a Roman bronze statue of an emperor from California-based collector Aaron Mendelsohn; and a bunch of Sixth-century BCE terracotta reliefs from the Virginia Museum of Advantageous Arts.
Legislation enforcement seized the sculpture of Demosthenes—originating from a website close to the fashionable Turkish metropolis of Izmir—from the Met earlier this 12 months; the Met is one among a number of museums now reviewing their collections and preemptively returning trafficked objects to their international locations of origin.
The Roman statue, estimated to be price $1.33 million, was looted from Bubon, an historic metropolis in south-central Turkey; it was surrendered by Mendolsohn in trade for a deferred prosecution settlement.
Moreover, 41 terracotta reliefs had been voluntarily returned by the Virginia Museum of Advantageous Arts. The plaques had been from a Phrygian temple in Düver, a website in south-central Turkey. The ATU had beforehand repatriated a aid stolen from Düver in 2022; as soon as the plaques had been decided to have been looted, the VMFA instantly surrendered their declare to them.
