The Kroisos What?

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The New York Sun

As if New Yorkers didn’t already have enough reasons to rue the scheduled loss of the Euphronios krater to Italy, they now have even more cause for concern with news from Turkey about the fate of another cache of antiquities returned to its country of origin from America, part of which was extracted from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Lydian Hoard, also known as the Croesus or Kroisos Treasure, consists of about 450 objects, mostly gold, dating from the sixth century before the common era. The objects were excavated, allegedly illicitly, in three digs between 1966 and 1968, and 55 objects ended up on display at the Met in the 1980s before Turkey launched a lawsuit to force their return. Their fate raises yet another red flag about the wisdom of cultural patrimony laws.

The Hoard was sent back to Usak, in western Turkey, in 1993, and put on display in a museum there in 1996. At which point, well, nothing. Not many people appear to have viewed them. A recent report in Zaman, a Turkish online publication, noted that only 769 people have visited the museum in the past five years. Turkish authorities blame poor advertising for failing to make foreign visitors to the area aware that the trove is on display. When those visitors have arrived, they haven’t been able to view the entire collection. Only about 300 of 450 objects in the Lydian Hoard are available for public viewing, while in the museum as a whole only 10% of more than 35,000 artifacts are on display.

Things might have been different for the Hoard had it been left in American museums. Although the Met no longer tracks attendance for the Greek and Roman galleries alone, about 700 people enter the museum every 30 minutes on a slow day. Since the Met returned its 55 objects from the Lydian Hoard, incidentally, it has more than doubled the exhibition space for such antiquities and the majority of its Greek and Roman holdings are now on view, either in display cases or in a facility available to researchers.

Not only are the Met’s antiquities more accessible to the public, but they are all there. The second piece of bad news to hit Turkey recently has been word that one of the objects in the Lydian Hoard, a gold brooch, may have been stolen from the museum at Usak. The Turkish culture ministry is investigating whether thieves absconded with the original, leaving a fake in its place. The museum apparently has not installed metal detectors at the doors, and guards do double duty distributing entry tickets, a Turkish newspaper, Milliyet, reported.

We don’t mean to disparage the Turks. They don’t have to display anything they don’t want to or can’t. But this case highlights the illogic of cultural patrimony laws. Such laws assume that the country that “owns” an artifact is also equipped to conserve and display it. That is not the case, not even, as we’ve noted before, in a relatively developed country like Italy. The money required suggests that not every institution, or country, is equipped to display valuable works. Yet Turkey’s apparent inability to exhibit or protect the Lydian Hoard didn’t discourage the country from launching a costly six-year legal fight to recoup the artifacts. In such a situation the public loses.


The New York Sun

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