Turkey bars artifact loans to NY and London exhibits

In a new Turkish campaign to reclaim many of the country’s most treasured artifacts from museums abroad, Turkey’s government has refused to loan artifacts to museums in England and the United States that house artifacts that were taken from Turkey under disputed circumstances. 

This 2,000-year-old relief of Antiochus I is housed at the British Museum but wanted by Turkey [Credit: Todays Zaman]

“You have artifacts that were stolen from Turkey. We’ll cooperate once you’ve returned them to us,” Turkish Culture and Tourism Minister Ertugrul Gunay said as he explained the government’s hard-line stance to the Cihan news agency on Sunday. 

Authorities from the Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry last week refused to loan the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art an unknown number of artifacts for a new exhibition entitled “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition.” Museum officials reported to the Art Newspaper that Turkey had requested the return of more than a dozen antiquities before they would loan to the institution. The museum was forced at the last minute to find replacements for the exhibit, which opens on March 14 and focuses on the multiethnic Byzantine state’s southern provinces during the meteoritic rise of Islam in the seventh century. 

In the UK, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum also found themselves facing a Turkish antiquities embargo on the eve of the opening of the exhibition “Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam” because of a dispute over artifacts that the Turkish government claims as its own. Among the most prominent pieces is a large stone relief depicting Antiochus I Theos of Commagene shaking hands with Herakles, a 2,000-year-old artifact taken from southern Anatolia by English archaeologists during World War I. 

The moves come as part of a broader campaign to see Anatolian artifacts returned by European museums. Culture and Tourism Ministry officials claim that by promising easier access to Turkey’s collections and archeological sites in return for the swift return of stolen artifacts, they have reclaimed roughly 4,500 artifacts from abroad since 2000.  

Source: Todays Zaman [March 04, 2012]