Reflecting growing pressure by New York prosecutors on museums and private collectors, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine 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 connected to a years-long investigation into antiquities trafficking networks by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. The items returned on December 8 were all linked to plundered archeological sites in Turkey; according to the DA’s office, the items were stolen from those sites and then exhibited and sold by dealers using faked provenance records.
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The objects included a 2nd-century marble head of Greek orator Demosthenes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art; a Roman bronze statue of an emperor from California-based collector Aaron Mendelsohn; and a group of 6th-century BCE terracotta reliefs from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Law enforcement seized the sculpture of Demosthenes—originating from a site near the modern Turkish city of Izmir—from the Met earlier this year; the Met is one of several museums now reviewing their collections and preemptively returning trafficked items to their countries of origin.
The Roman statue, estimated to be worth $1.33 million, was looted from Bubon, an ancient city in south-central Turkey; it was surrendered by Mendolsohn in exchange for a deferred prosecution agreement.
The 41 terracotta reliefs were voluntarily returned by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The plaques were from a Phrygian temple in Düver, as site in south-central Turkey. The ATU had previously repatriated a relief stolen from Düver in 2022; the VMFA proactively alerted the ATU after reviewing their holdings, and once the plaques were determined to have been looted, immediately surrendered them to the Manhattan DA.
