The Tamesis
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and an American collector have returned dozens of looted artifacts to Turkey, reflecting increasing pressure from New York prosecutors on museums and private collectors. It is reported new york timesOn December 8, a repatriation ceremony was held in New York.
The deportations are related to a years-long investigation into antiquities trafficking networks by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. The items returned on December 8 were all related to looted archaeological sites in Turkey; the items were stolen from those sites and then displayed and sold by dealers using falsified provenance records, according to the District Attorney’s Office.
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These items include a 2nd-century marble head of the Greek orator Demosthenes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art; a bronze statue of a Roman emperor from the collection of California collector Aaron Mendelsohn; and a group of 6th-century B.C. terracotta reliefs from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Earlier this year, law enforcement seized the Demosthenes sculpture from a site near the modern Turkish city of Izmir from the Met, one of several museums currently reviewing its collections and preemptively returning smuggled items to their countries of origin.
The Roman statue, worth an estimated $1.33 million, was stolen from the ancient city of Bubon in south-central Türkiye; Mendorson turned it over in exchange for a deferred prosecution agreement.
These 41 terracotta reliefs were voluntarily returned by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The plaques come from a Phrygian temple in Duver, south-central Türkiye. The ATU previously returned relief items stolen from Düver in 2022; the VMFA proactively alerted the ATU after reviewing the items in its possession, and once it was determined that the plaque had been looted, it was immediately turned over to the Manhattan District Attorney.
