The Lydian Hoard

The group consists of about three hundred and sixty-three objects of the sixth century BC: gold and silver vessels, jewellery and ornaments, a pair of marble sphinxes, and sections of painted plaster wall from the tomb chambers. It came from burial tumuli around the village of Gure in the Usak region of western Anatolia, the heartland of the kingdom of Lydia, whose capital was Sardis and whose last king was Croesus.

Three tumuli are named in the accounts: Ikiztepe, Aktepe and Toptepe. Lydian tombs of the class are furnished rather than merely filled. The body lay on a bed and the precious objects were arranged around it, so what came out was not a hoard in the sense of buried valuables but the contents of a room, with its own internal arrangement, which is exactly what an undocumented excavation destroys first.

The masterpiece was small. A gold brooch in the form of a hippocamp, a horse with wings and a fish's tail, standing barely an inch and a half high, carrying three sets of three hanging golden braids each ending in a ball worked as a pomegranate. Land, water and air in one object. There is no other like it, and everything in the second half of this record happens to that brooch.

The digging began in 1965, when farmers from Gure and Usak broke into the tumulus called Ikiztepe. Turkish police learned of it and recovered some material in 1966, which went into Turkish museums; those pieces later became the comparison set that made the whole case provable. Most of what came out of the ground was already abroad.

Word spread locally that the first diggers had been paid, and others went at the neighbouring mounds, Aktepe and Toptepe. One tomb was entered on the night of 6 June 1966 by blowing in the roof. A looter's statement to the police, quoted at length in Sharon Waxman's account, describes digging in shifts for nine or ten days, reaching stone blocks a metre and a half high and eighty centimetres wide that five or six men could not lift, failing to break them with sledgehammers and pokers, and finally opening the main entrance with black powder.

Inside, the body had gone to dust and a hunk of hair. The gold and silver were undamaged. That one chamber gave up a hundred and twenty-five pieces.

The looters were eventually identified because one of them went to the police after a quarrel over dividing the money. By then the objects had been sold overseas. It is worth holding on to the sequence: the Turkish state knew within months that tombs in the Usak region had been emptied, had recovered part of the material, and had a name - Ali Bayirlar, a dealer in Izmir - for the man the looters sold to.

Bayirlar sold to John J. Klejman, who kept a gallery on Madison Avenue, and to George Zacos, a Swiss dealer. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the material in three batches between 1966 and 1970, on the recommendation of Dietrich von Bothmer, curator of Greek and Roman Art, who presented it to the acquisitions committee of the Board of Trustees.

It then went into the storerooms and stayed there for more than a decade. A handful of pieces appeared in a survey exhibition in 1972 without being published in the catalogue. When part of the group finally went on permanent display in 1984 - some fifty pieces - the label read East Greek treasure.

That phrase is the centre of this record. It is not a lie in the sense that a forged export licence is a lie. It is a curatorial description that is technically arguable and functionally protective: East Greek covers the Aegean coast broadly and points away from inland Lydia, which is where anyone looking for the Usak material would look. The museum was not concealing the objects by then; it was concealing the question. A visitor could stand in front of them and a Turkish official could read the catalogue, and neither would be prompted to ask where in Anatolia they came from.

What the museum itself understood is on the record from two directions. Turkish enquiries in 1970 drew a denial from Theodore Rousseau, the Met's chief curator, that anything had been exported illegally, together with the remark that there seemed to be hearsay built around something that might have a kernel of truth in it. Asked by the New York Post where the treasures came from, von Bothmer's answer was to refer the question to Klejman. And Thomas Hoving, the director, later wrote in his memoir that everyone at the museum believed the material had been illegally dug up, that if the Turks produced proof it would go back, and that the museum had taken its chances when it bought.

Nothing in this case was ever bought at auction, so no hammer price and no buyer's premium exist anywhere in it. What exist are four different private-purchase figures, published by four different people, and they do not reconcile.

In 1973 the New York Times art critic John Canaday, working from a story the museum itself leaked, reported that 219 Greek gold and silver pieces had been bought for about 500,000 dollars by the dealer J. J. Klejman and sold on to the museum in 1966, 1967 and 1968 - a figure that is Klejman's cost, not the Met's. Sharon Waxman gives 1.5 million dollars paid by the Met over several years. Ozgen Acar, interviewed by the UNESCO Courier in 2001, put the Met's outlay at 1.7 million dollars and made the point that the museum then spent at least twice that on legal expenses fighting to keep the objects. A widely circulated tertiary account gives roughly 200 pieces for 1.2 million dollars in 1967 and 1968.

A record that quoted one of these as the price would be tidier and would be wrong. The honest statement is that the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid somewhere between 1.2 and 1.7 million dollars for the Lydian Hoard, in instalments, between 1966 and 1970, and that the museum's own accounts of the transaction have never been published in a form that settles it. On Acar's arithmetic the litigation cost more than the objects did.

In 1970 the British journalist Peter Hopkirk of the Sunday Times called on Ozgen Acar, then ten years into a career at the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet, and told him he was chasing a treasure smuggled out of Turkey and bought in secret by an American museum. They agreed to work it together and publish simultaneously. They got nowhere. In Usak nobody had heard of a golden hoard; at the Met, the curator of Ancient Near Eastern Art told Acar there was nothing of the kind in his department, which was true, because the objects were in Greek and Roman.

Hopkirk gave up. Acar did not, and he did not publish either. For sixteen years he worked the story in his own time, travelling the six hours by bus to Usak every five or six months, becoming a familiar face, waiting for the resentment of the people who had missed out on the money to come to the surface. Eventually it did, in fragments: someone had been paid for digging in the tumuli. On one visit a villager took him into the street and told him six or seven men were about to rob a mound. Acar passed it to the local authorities, and the archaeologist assigned to excavate the site instead was the curator of the Usak museum, Kazim Akbiyikoglu. That is how the two men met.

The break came in 1984 in a gallery in New York. Acar, who had moved to the United States and was watching the Met's exhibitions and catalogues, saw fifty pieces on display that matched the descriptions he had spent fourteen years assembling. They were labelled East Greek treasure. He said afterwards that by then he knew the objects like the lines of his own palm.

He took what he had to the Turkish minister of education, including police photographs of the material seized from the looters in the 1960s set against the pieces at the Met. Then he published: seven articles in Milliyet in 1986, the first under an eight-column headline saying that the Turks wanted the Lydian and Croesus treasures back.

Turkey made a formal demand for return in July 1986 and sent its consul general to meet museum officials. The demand was refused. On 29 May 1987 the Republic of Turkey filed suit against the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the federal court in Manhattan, represented by the American lawyers Harry Rand and Lawrence Kaye. For a source nation with no track record of suing a major foreign institution, that was an extraordinary step.

The Met did what any defendant would do. It moved to dismiss, on the ground that the applicable three-year limitation period had long since run, and that Turkey had in any case failed to make its demand within a reasonable time after identifying the possessor. The motion was not a side issue. Had it succeeded, the museum would have held an enforceable ruling sanctioning its title, and the merits would never have been reached.

In 1990 Judge Vincent L. Broderick denied it. Republic of Turkey v. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 762 F. Supp. 44 (S.D.N.Y. 1990). The court applied the New York demand and refusal rule: against a possessor of stolen property, the cause of action does not accrue until the true owner demands the object back and is refused. Turkey demanded in 1986 and sued in 1987, comfortably inside three years of accrual. The court further held that the timing of the demand was reasonable in light of the fact that the museum had kept the collection in its storerooms until 1984.

Read that second holding again. The museum's own decision to keep the objects out of public view for eighteen years, which had protected it from a claim, became the reason the claim was allowed to proceed. Concealment did not start the clock; it stopped it.

With the motion denied, the case went into pre-trial discovery, and this is the part of the story a collector should study rather than the part about looting.

The museum was required to produce documents, and among them were the minutes of the acquisitions committee meeting at which the purchase had been approved. In pre-trial testimony the curator who bought the collection stated that no effort had been made to determine where the objects had actually come from. Lawyers and archaeologists acting for Turkey were allowed to examine the objects themselves. Among those who came was Kazim Akbiyikoglu of the Usak museum, who swore an affidavit setting out what he knew of their origin.

Then the physical evidence. Turkish archaeologists compared the Met's pieces against the material the police had recovered from the looters in 1966 and held in Turkish museums. And the fragments of painted plaster in New York were measured against what was left on the walls of the tombs at Usak, and they fitted the gaps. Looters cooperating with the investigation described the objects they had taken, and the descriptions matched the collection in Manhattan.

None of this is connoisseurship and none of it required an expert opinion on style. A cut edge that matches the wall it was cut from is a mechanical fit, in the same class of evidence as the woodworm tunnels that reunited a dismembered Cimabue diptych. It cannot be argued about.

The museum tried to salvage terms. One proposal was a form of joint custody in which the hoard, by then established at 363 pieces, would spend five years in New York and five in Turkey; the Turkish side says the offer covered only a small part of the material. Around Christmas 1992 the Met's president William Luers and its director Philippe de Montebello travelled to Turkey to put a deal to the minister of culture, Fikri Saglar. He declined to meet them.

Facing trial, the Met agreed in September 1993 to return everything. Its statement conceded two things that no major American museum had conceded before: that Turkish authorities had produced evidence that most of the material may indeed have been removed clandestinely from tombs in the Usak region, much of it only months before the museum acquired it; and that the museum had learned through discovery that its own records suggested some of its staff in the 1960s were likely aware, as they acquired the objects, that the provenance was controversial.

This is a settlement and not a judgment, and the difference is not cosmetic. No court ever held that Turkey owned the Lydian Hoard. No precedent binding on any other museum was created about title to looted antiquities. What was created was the 1990 limitation ruling, which is a genuine precedent and which is about procedure, plus a demonstration that discovery in an American court will pull a museum's acquisition minutes into the open. The settlement also carried a cooperation clause: conservation work, reciprocal loans, archaeological excavation in Turkey and study fellowships in both countries.

The objects reached Turkey in October 1993, a month after the concession. They were shown in Istanbul, Ankara and other cities - two years in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara on one account - and in 1995 they went to the Usak Museum of Archaeology, where they joined the pieces the police had recovered from the same tombs thirty years earlier.

In 2006 the senior culture official in Usak reported that over the previous five years the museum's total attendance had been 769 people. He noted, in mitigation, that only about 17,000 tourists had come to the region at all in that period. The Metropolitan's spokesman Harold Holzer observed that the number of people who had seen those treasures in Turkey was roughly equal to one hour's worth of visitors at the Met.

The remark is easy to file as institutional spite and harder to answer. The case for returning objects to the place they were made rests partly on meaning and partly on access, and the second half of it failed here. Acar's own campaign slogan, which went up as a poster in libraries, classrooms, shops and municipal offices across the region, was that history is beautiful where it belongs. The hoard belonged in Usak on any reading of that sentence, and for five years an average of three people a week went to look at it.

Acar had also asked the ministry to install a working security system when the collection moved to Usak. There was none, or none that functioned.

In April 2006 Milliyet ran a front page reporting that the gold hippocamp on display in the Usak museum - the object whose image appeared daily on the masthead of the local newspaper and which had become the emblem of the town - was a fake.

The police examined the brooch in the case. It was a fake. The proof was not stylistic and did not require an art historian. The original weighs 14.3 grams. The object in the case weighed 23.5. The substitution is thought to have taken place between March and August 2005, so the counterfeit had sat on public display for something close to a year, photographed and reproduced as the town's symbol, before anyone put it on a balance.

A museum register is a document like an export licence or a court order, and it can be falsified in the same way. The difference is that a register is meant to be the control on everything else. When the register is wrong, there is nothing behind it.

Weeks after the Milliyet story the culture ministry announced that the director of the Usak museum was suspected. It was Kazim Akbiyikoglu.

He was the local archaeologist Acar had first dealt with in the 1970s, when a tip-off about a tumulus about to be robbed was passed to the authorities and Akbiyikoglu was sent to excavate it properly. He had spent twenty years fighting smugglers in the region and trying to get the police to act. He had given the affidavit in the New York litigation and travelled to the United States to examine the objects. He had adopted Acar's campaign as his own. His father had been a member of parliament and he was among the most respected archaeologists in Turkey. Acar went on television to defend him and, by his own account, could not sleep for a fortnight.

What had happened in between is recorded plainly enough. The work had cost him his marriage; his wife left him for the mayor of Usak, and in 2005 she and her new husband were killed in a road accident with Akbiyikoglu's two children in the back of the car. He was arrested with ten others - the charges against the group were reported in the Turkish Daily News on 14 July 2006 - and he admitted selling museum property to pay gambling debts. He was sentenced to thirteen years.

The temptation is to write this as tragedy and stop. The useful reading is narrower. Every control in this case had failed at the point where a single person was trusted without verification: the acquisitions committee that approved a purchase nobody had researched, the label that nobody questioned for eighteen years, and finally a museum director with keys to his own vitrines in a building with no working alarm.

Three physical objects have been called the hippocamp, and any picture, label or catalogue entry that does not say which one it shows is worthless. This record sets them out because the confusion is not hypothetical: it has already been printed on the front page of a newspaper every day for a year.

The original. Looted from a tumulus near Gure in the middle 1960s, sold through Ali Bayirlar to Klejman, bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art between 1966 and 1970, returned to Turkey under the September 1993 settlement, and on display at Usak from 1995. Weight 14.3 grams.

The counterfeit. Substituted for the original in its case at the Usak museum, probably between March and August 2005, exposed in April 2006. Weight 23.5 grams. It was afterwards itself put on display at the Usak museum as the exhibit of its own theft, which is where Sharon Waxman photographed it for the 2008 publication of her book. Between 2006 and 2012, therefore, the object a visitor to Usak saw in the hippocamp's place was the fake, correctly labelled as such.

The original again. Traced to Germany and announced in November 2012 as returning to Turkey, shown temporarily at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, and returned to the Usak Museum of Archaeology.

The archive carries no photograph of any of the three. No free-licence image of the Lydian Hoard exists: the photographs of the Usak material on Wikimedia Commons are all CC BY-SA, and a photograph of a three-dimensional object carries its own copyright however old the object. Rather than show a picture of something else and let a reader assume, this record shows nothing of the hoard at all and says so. Given that the entire second half of this story is a substitution nobody noticed, an unlabelled plate here would be the exact error the publication exists to prevent.

Turkey did not win a judgment and no court decided who owned the Lydian Hoard. What the case produced was narrower and more durable.

First, a limitation precedent: 762 F. Supp. 44 stands for the proposition that a foreign state's claim against an American museum is not automatically stale, that the clock runs from demand and refusal, and that a possessor who keeps material out of public view cannot then complain that nobody claimed it. Second, a demonstration that discovery reaches acquisition files, committee minutes and curatorial testimony, which is a far more effective instrument against an institutional buyer than any convention. Third, a template: the settlement paired unconditional return with a cooperation programme of loans, excavation and fellowships, and that pairing has been the shape of nearly every museum restitution agreement since.

The consequences ran outward quickly. Turkey pursued Sotheby's, sued for objects held in Germany and London, and went after the Telli family, a smuggling network Acar had written about; the family sued him, he was acquitted, and he then received death threats and later learned of a plan to abduct him and ship him abroad in a crate with an oxygen tank. The Getty Museum gave up a sculpture cut from a sarcophagus at Perge, and a German foundation surrendered other parts of the same piece. Engin Ozgen, Turkey's Director General of Monuments and Museums, called the settlement an extraordinary victory.

And the object at the centre of it was stolen again thirteen years later, by the man who had gone to New York to identify it, out of a museum with no working alarm, and was not missed for the better part of a year. Restitution is a transfer of custody. It is not, by itself, custody.