The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has announced the recovery of ancient artefacts worth a staggering $2.2 million (€2.1 million), which will be returned to Greece and Italy.
A special repatriation ceremony held on Tuesday (25 February), attended by Greece’s Minister of Culture Dr. Lina Mendoni and the Consul General of Greece, Ifigeneia Kanara, marked the return of eleven ancient Greek pieces.
These included a votive figurine dating from 1300-1200 BCE and a marble funerary relief from the 4th-3rd century BCE. Other treasures being sent back to Greece include a Hellenistic statuette of Atalanta, a battle-scene aryballos (flask) from 600-500 BCE, and a Dionysian kantharos (cup) from the 4th century BCE.
The Greek items recovered by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office are estimated to be worth around $1 million (€953,000), according to Greek newspaper Kathimerini.
“The return of these pieces is the product of a substantial and ongoing investigation into several traffickers,” District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg Jr. said in a statement. “I am pleased we have now seized more than 120 antiquities throughout the investigation, and that is continuing to this day. I am grateful to our antiquities trafficking team and partners in Greece for their outstanding collaboration and partnership.”
The seizure of these objects comes after a similar announcement earlier this month, when District Attorney Bragg revealed the recovery of 107 Italian artefacts valued at $1.2 million (€1.14 million). These items were also linked to notorious antiquities smugglers such as Giacomo Medici, Giovanni Franco Becchina, and Robert Hecht.
Among the most significant of the Italian items was a Terracotta Kylix Band-Cup from the mid-6th century BCE. This ancient drinking vessel was found at the Etruscan site of Vulci in the 1960s and smuggled out of Italy by dealer Robert Hecht. It was later acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017 before being seized by the DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU). Other notable pieces include an Apulian Volute Krater from 320-310 BCE and a 4th-century BCE Bronze Patera, both of which were also smuggled by high-profile traffickers before being recovered by the ATU.
Since its creation at the end of 2017, the ATU has recovered almost 6,000 antiquities valued at more than $460 million (€439 million) and has returned more than 5,400 of them to 29 countries, the unit says.
This latest repatriation effort follow’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s announcement earlier this week that it would return a 7th-century bronze head to Greece, following an internal provenance review. The museum’s researchers determined the artefact had likely been illegally removed from the Archaeological Museum of Olympia in the 1930s, though the specifics of its removal remain unclear.
