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The bronze head of a Roman emperor is on its way back to Turkey. A Danish museum has agreed to return the looted artifact as NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: The bronze head of Roman emperor Septimius Severus was first looted by villagers who lived near Bubon, a site where Roman emperors were once worshipped. Then Turkish authorities stepped in.
LIZ MARLOWE: Authorities got wind of the fact that there was a bunch of life-sized bronze statues coming out of the ground there, which is an extraordinary thing.
BLAIR: Liz Marlowe is a professor of art history at Colgate University. The head made it into the hands of a notorious art smuggler named Robert Hecht Jr.
MARLOWE: He realized there was a lot of money to be made in connecting the guys in the countryside in Italy and Greece and Turkey with the art dealers.
BLAIR: Eventually, Severus' head ended up at the Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen. In a press release, the museum says, based on strong arguments and scientific documentation, it agrees the head was excavated illegally and will return it to Turkey. The Roman emperor's body was also looted from the same spot. It ended up at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Last year, the statue was seized from the MET by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan district attorney's office and returned. Marlowe has spent years studying how American museums are presenting these artifacts known to be looted from Turkey.
MARLOWE: I was going around to the museums and looking at all the labels and was very interested in whether or not the labels mention Bubon. Do the labels mention Turkey? Do labels talk about the looting? Spoiler - they don't talk about the looting.
BLAIR: But now they're under pressure to be more transparent about what's in their collections and how it got there. Marlowe thinks there's been a generational shift.
MARLOWE: And I think that's why there's been so much attention in recent years to these stories of the sordid origins of so many of the pieces in our museum collections.
BLAIR: In a statement, the Turkish ambassador to Denmark, Reza Hakan Tekin, says the bronze head of Septimius Severus sets a precedent that artifacts with a shady provenance should be returned to their rightful owners. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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