Turkey Notches Another Successful Restitution After Denver Art Museum Returns 1500-Year-Old Marble Head
The Denver Art Museum has returned to Turkey a marble head of a bearded man that was stolen from the ancient city of Smyrna (present-day Izmir), an object Turkey says was unearthed in the city’s agora and likely carved in the fifth century BCE. Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said the restitution was achieved through cooperation with the museum, and the sculpture is now on view at the İzmir Archaeology Museum. The return is part of Turkey’s broader restitution campaign, which has included its first official repatriation from Canada in March: seven manuscript pages in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, two rare printed pages, and two modern calligraphy works dating from the 17th to 19th centuries. In 2024, additional returns linked to a Manhattan District Attorney’s Office Antiquities Trafficking Unit investigation included a 2nd-century marble head of Demosthenes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 6th-century BCE terracotta reliefs from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and a Roman bronze emperor statue worth $1.33 million surrendered by collector Aaron Mendelsohn.
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This story was covered in New Museums, Old Wounds: Restitution and Rehangs