Turkey is today pursuing an aggressive retentionist policy towards antquities of which it claims absolute ownership and wants "returned" from the museums that preserve and display them: Matthias Schulz
'Art War': Turkey Battles to Repatriate Antiquities Speigel July 20, 2012. The government wants to stock the galleries of a 25,000-square-meter
(270,000-square-foot) "Museum of the Civilizations" in the Turkish capital Ankara with items from our museums. Their new museum ("the biggest museum in the
world") will be opened in 2023 so as to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Turkish
Republic.
There could not be a clearer assertion of the relationship between retentive antiquities policies and nationalism. Yet:
the Turks themselves can claim little credit for their archeological
treasures. Their ancestors, the Seljuks, only arrived from the steppes
of Central Asia in the 11th century. Christian Constantinople, now known
as Istanbul, fell in 1453.
Before then, however, Hittites, Greeks, Romans and Byzantines had built
enormous palaces, monasteries and amphitheaters in the region. Whether
it was Homer, Thales or King Midas -- they all lived on the other side
of the Dardanelles.
When the new Muslim masters took over, the region's illustrious past
faded into obscurity. The water-pipe-smoking caliphs were more concerned
with pursuing their own interests.
Modern Turkey is embracing the heritage of the ancient lands that it now occupies and appropriating it for itself. A powerful antiquities bureaucracy has grown up in recent
years. But their effectiveness in protecting that heritage is doubtful in the face of corruption:
a
well-organized local mafia has continued to wreak havoc in Turkey.
For example, in the early 1960s, among the remains of the ancient city
of Boubon in southwestern Turkey, thieves discovered a Roman temple
filled with more than 30 life-size bronze imperial statues. It would
have been a global sensation -- but the public never saw the statues.
Instead, unbeknownst to the authorities, they all vanished into the
voracious pipelines of the global antiquities trade.
Or perhaps the authorities knew all about it, it is presumably not easy to move 30 life size bronze statues around without being seen. In any case, how much of a moral right do the Turks have to
repatriation of artefacts when they have objects removed from other countries in their museums?
Critics are openly airing their displeasure with
Turkey's behavior online. Instead of lodging complaints, they argue,
Turkey ought to return the Obelisk of Theodosius, which stands in
Istanbul, to Egypt.
Indeed, the Ottomans themselves weren't squeamish when it came to
appropriating cultural goods. They stole artifacts in Mecca and allowed a
private British citizen to pry away the frieze from the Parthenon in
Athens -- in return for a lot of money. During the Turkish invasion of
northern Cyprus in 1974, the occupiers emptied out entire museums.
"The Turks are too determined to depict themselves as victims of
cultural oppression to accept that foreign museums and archaeologists
have also played a part in saving their treasures," the Economist wrote
in May. For example, when the German archeologist Carl Humann entered
the majestic ruins of Pergamon in 1864, he saw large numbers of lime
kilns in use. Workers were smashing ancient marble columns and throwing
the pieces into the fire. After reaching a deal with the Ottoman
government, he then brought the Pergamon Altar back to Berlin to be the
centerpiece of a museum of the same name. But Turkey has long called for
its repatriation.
Turkey’s aggressive measures against large international museums has raised controversy in the art world. It has returned the focus of repatriation again to the question: Who Owns Antiquity?
