The Lydian Hoard (Karun Treasure)

The Lydian Hoard, also called the Karun Treasure, is a group of 363 gold and silver objects looted from Lydian burial tumuli near Usak, Turkey, in the mid-1960s, sold piecemeal to the Metropolitan Museum of Art between 1966 and 1970, and returned to Turkey in 1993 after a six-year lawsuit that ended when the museum's own internal correspondence, surfaced in discovery, showed its staff had believed from the start that the material was illegally excavated.

This record anchors on the hoard's smallest and most notorious single piece: a gold brooch in the shape of a winged sea-horse, a hippocamp, barely an inch and a half high. In 2005 the director of the Turkish museum charged with the collection's safekeeping, the same man whose fieldwork had helped win the treasure back from New York, stole the genuine brooch to cover gambling debts and replaced it with a heavier fake. The substitution was exposed in 2006 by a simple weight discrepancy, he was convicted in 2009, and the genuine brooch resurfaced intact in Germany in 2012, its intervening seven years unaccounted for in any source located for this record.

No free-licensed photograph of the genuine, recovered hippocamp brooch could be located. The only Commons image of the piece is explicitly documented, by the photographer's own file notes, as the confiscated fake photographed in 2012 while it was still on display; this record uses it only to illustrate the substitution itself, clearly labeled as such.

What this record covers

This record covers the group of 363 gold and silver objects, looted from Lydian burial tumuli near Usak in western Turkey in the mid-1960s, bought piecemeal by the Metropolitan Museum of Art between 1966 and 1970, and returned to Turkey in 1993 after a six-year lawsuit. It is anchored on the single piece that carries the group's second scandal: a small gold brooch in the form of a hippocamp, a winged sea-horse, barely 3.8 centimetres high and weighing 14.3 grams, that was stolen from the Turkish museum meant to be its permanent safekeeping and replaced with a fake by the same institution's own director.

The group is also known in Turkey as the Karun Treasure, after Karun, the Turkish name for Croesus, the legendary last king of Lydia. The objects themselves mostly postdate Croesus's reign, which ended when the Persians conquered Sardis in 547 or 546 BCE. The popular name attaches a specific king's fortune to material made after his fall; this record treats that as a naming convention, not a documented attribution to Croesus personally.

The tumuli and the looting

Illegal digging at the Lydian burial mounds around the village of Gure, in Usak province, began in the mid-1960s. Sources differ on exact sequence: excavation of the Ikiztepe tumulus is dated to 1965 in one account, with police recovering some material in 1966 after most of it had already left the country; a separate account dates the breaching of a Lydian noblewoman's tomb chamber near Toptepe to the night of 6 June 1966, using dynamite to get through the stone entrance, with further digging through 1966 and 1967 at Aktepe and a mound called Basmaci. A further tumulus near Harta, in neighboring Manisa province, was also looted. One looter later described the work: nine or ten days of digging in shifts before reaching the stone chamber, then black powder to breach it. A single tomb chamber could hold well over a hundred objects.

The looters sold what they found to Ali Bayirlar, an antiquities dealer working out of Izmir. Bayirlar sold it on to two dealers with New York and Swiss addresses: J. J. Klejman, who ran a gallery on Madison Avenue, and George Zacos, based in Switzerland. From there the material reached the Metropolitan Museum.

The Met buys, in three batches

The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the group across three successive purchases between 1966 and 1970. Curator Dietrich von Bothmer, the museum's authority on Greek and Roman antiquities, presented the pieces to the acquisitions committee. Press accounts of the total price differ: a commonly cited figure across the three purchases is approximately 1.5 million dollars; a separate accounting, based on invoices for 200 of the pieces bought in 1967 and 1968 specifically, gives 1.2 million dollars for that portion. Neither figure has been reconciled against a full itemized invoice in the sources consulted.

The material included gold necklaces with acorn and floral pendants, kidney-shaped gold bracelets with lion-protome terminals in the Achaemenid manner, silver oinochoai and phialai with Persian and Anatolian decoration, bronze and silver incense burners, appliques stamped with star and floral motifs, fragments of tomb wall paintings showing funerary processions, and the small gold hippocamp brooch, its three sets of braided gold tassels ending in pomegranate-shaped terminals.

A Bulletin, a catalogue, and a journalist's memory

In August 1970 the New York Times printed a dispatch, sourced from the Times of London, reporting that Turkey had formally asked the Metropolitan Museum for details about an allegedly illegally exported hoard from tombs near Sardis in the Hermus river valley. The museum did not respond by returning anything.

In 1984 von Bothmer published the material in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin under the title A Greek and Roman Treasury, exhibiting it as an undifferentiated group of Greek and Roman metalwork labeled East Greek, without the findspot or acquisition history that would have identified it as the Lydian material Turkey had inquired about fourteen years earlier.

Ozgen Acar, a Turkish journalist who had been investigating the hoard's disappearance since 1970, after a British colleague pointed him toward it, recognized around fifty of the pieces in the 1984 Bulletin as matching the profile of what had gone missing from the Sardis region. In 1986 he published a series of articles in the newspaper Milliyet under headlines translating roughly as Turks want the Lydian, Croesus treasures back. Turkey's Ministry of Culture formally demanded the material's return that year. The museum refused.

Turkey sues, and the statute of limitations fails

On 29 May 1987 the Republic of Turkey filed suit against the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, represented by American lawyers including Lawrence M. Kaye. The museum moved to dismiss on the ground that Turkey had waited too long, arguing laches and the statute of limitations.

On 16 July 1990, in a published opinion, Judge Vincent L. Broderick declined to grant the museum's motion. Applying New York's demand-and-refusal rule for stolen property, the court held that the limitations clock started running from Turkey's 1986 demand and refusal, not from the original 1960s purchases, and that genuine disputes of fact about what the museum knew and when precluded summary judgment. The ruling, reported as Republic of Turkey v. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 762 F. Supp. 44 (S.D.N.Y. 1990), sent the case into full discovery rather than ending it.

What discovery uncovered

Discovery produced the museum's own internal correspondence. Thomas Hoving, the Metropolitan's director through the years of acquisition, later wrote in his own memoir, published after the settlement: We all believe the stuff was illegally dug up. If the Turks come up with the proof from their side, we'll give the East Greek treasure back. The line was his own characterization of the museum's internal position at the time of purchase, not a hostile paraphrase by an opposing lawyer.

Turkey's evidence included an affidavit from Kazim Akbiyikoglu, by then curator of the Usak Museum, who had measured surviving fragments of the tomb wall paintings against the physical gaps in the walls of one of the looted chambers and found that they fit. The match tied specific objects in the Met's holdings to a specific, identifiable, illegally excavated tomb, which is a considerably harder thing for a defendant to argue against than a general claim of illegal export.

Settlement and return, 1993

Around Christmas 1992 the Metropolitan's president, William Luers, and its director, Philippe de Montebello, traveled to Turkey to negotiate a resolution short of full return, proposing a joint-custody arrangement of five years in New York and five in Turkey. Turkey's Culture Minister, Fikri Saglar, declined to meet them on those terms.

In September 1993 the museum agreed to return the full 363-piece group, stating publicly that Turkish authorities did provide evidence that most of the material in question may indeed have been removed clandestinely from the tombs. The material arrived in Turkey in October 1993, was displayed initially in Ankara, and was transferred to the Usak Museum, in the province where the tombs themselves lie, in 1995.

The curator who brought it home

Kazim Akbiyikoglu was, by the account of the journalist who had spent sixteen years pursuing the case, an ally in the recovery effort: the man whose affidavit and fieldwork helped tie the Met's holdings to a specific looted tomb, and who went on to serve as director of the museum built to hold the treasure once it came home.

His personal life deteriorated in the years that followed. His ex-wife left him to marry the mayor of Usak; in 2005 she and her new husband were killed in a traffic accident, reportedly with his own children present. It was in this period, according to what he later admitted, that he sold the museum's genuine hippocamp brooch to cover gambling debts and had a replica put in its place.

A fake in the case, 2005-2006

The substitution is dated by press reporting to sometime between March and August 2005. It went undetected by the museum's own staff. In April or May 2006, following an anonymous tip, the newspaper Milliyet reported that the hippocamp on display in Usak was not genuine. The proof was mundane and conclusive: the authentic brooch weighed 14.3 grams; the piece in the case weighed 23.5 grams, nearly two-thirds heavier, well outside anything explainable by wear or measurement error. A gold coin from the same collection had also been swapped.

Investigators arrested Akbiyikoglu along with nine other people. He did not contest that he had sold the brooch. His account, given during the investigation, was that gambling debts had left him with no other way out; he was also reported to have blamed his misfortune on a curse popularly associated with the treasure, a piece of folklore this record notes as his stated remark, not as an explanation this record adopts.

Trial and sentence, 2009

The case took roughly three years to reach judgment. In early 2009 a Turkish court convicted Akbiyikoglu of theft and embezzlement and sentenced him to close to thirteen years in prison. The nine co-defendants received lesser prison terms than Akbiyikoglu; the exact individual terms are not specified in the sources consulted for this record.

At the time of conviction the genuine brooch's whereabouts remained unknown. Acar, the journalist who had defended his old ally on Turkish television before learning the full truth, speculated publicly that it might have been melted down into bullion to eliminate the evidence. That was speculation, stated as such by the person who made it, not a documented fact, and this record grades it accordingly: unknown.

Recovered in Germany, 2012

In late November 2012, seven years after it disappeared from the display case in Usak, the genuine hippocamp brooch surfaced intact in Germany. German authorities agreed to return it to Turkey. Contemporary reporting from the Guardian, from Hurriyet Daily News and from other outlets confirmed the recovery and the planned return, but none of the accounts located for this record disclose how the brooch reached Germany, who had held it in the interim, or the specifics of any German legal proceeding connected to its recovery. Turkey's Culture Minister, Ertugrul Gunay, said at the time that the piece would be back in Usak by early 2013.

The recovered brooch was displayed temporarily at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. A researcher visiting the Usak Museum in December 2013 reported that the fake was still the object on public display there at that date, with a security guard privately confirming to visitors that it was not genuine, while the recovered original remained in Ankara awaiting transfer to a larger Usak building then under construction.

Gold from the Pactolus: materials and workshop context

Lydia's association with gold is not folklore layered on afterward. Excavation at Sardis itself uncovered a gold refinery of the Croesus period, where naturally occurring electrum from the Pactolus river and other local streams and mines, typically 17 to 30 percent silver by weight, was processed into separated gold and silver of a controlled, reliable purity. That refining capability underwrote Lydia's most famous economic invention: Herodotus records that they were the first of men, so far as we know, who struck and used coin of gold or silver, and also the first retail-traders. Croesus's own coinage, the bimetallic Croeseid series, depended directly on the refining process excavated at Sardis.

The hippocamp brooch and the wider hoard sit inside that documented industry. No single named workshop or goldsmith is recorded for any piece; the attribution to Sardis rests on findspot and on the comparison of technique, granulation and filigree construction consistent with other Achaemenid-period Anatolian goldwork, rather than on a signature or contract. That the region that pioneered gold refining and coinage also produced this level of small-scale goldsmith's work is a documented pattern, not a speculative one; who specifically made this brooch is not.

What is on display now

The Usak Museum of Archaeology has occupied a larger building since sometime between an announced 2013 completion date and a relocation dated by other sources to 2018; this record has not been able to reconcile the two dates and flags it as unresolved. By September 2018, Anadolu Agency reported 432 pieces on display in a dedicated second-floor gallery of a two-story, 14,500-square-meter building, describing the hippocamp brooch, by then returned, as having been stolen twice over its history: once from the tomb in the 1960s, and once from the museum meant to protect it. The piece count of 432, and figures as high as 450 reported elsewhere, exceed the 363 objects that were the subject of the 1993 restitution; this record has not confirmed how much of the difference is additional Lydian material from controlled excavation displayed alongside the restituted hoard, as opposed to further accessions to the hoard itself.