The History Blog

Frescoes in the 16th-century Orthodox church of St. Friday’s in Valsh, a remote Albanian village 35 miles south of Tirana, have been damaged beyond repair by looters. Twice in a week, the first time on December 30th, the second on January 4th, thieves hacked at the frescoes with axes and knives, focusing mainly on removing the heads of saints.

To add insult to injury, the looters were incompetent. Most of the seven or eight frescoes (the number is different in different reports) attacked wound up crushed in pieces on the floor instead of removed whole. Some of the worst damage was done to the fresco of St. Friday’s. His entire head and the aureole around it is gone, as is the inscription to the left of the halo which was important for art historical reference.

The frescoes are by master icon painter Onufri who lived in Valsh and frescoed the walls of its modest little church in 1554. Known for his use of brilliant colors and his introduction of more realistic facial expressions into the flat conventions of Byzantine style, Onufri is considered Albania’s greatest icon maker, although it’s not certain if he was born in what is today Albania or in northern Greece. The signature on his Valsh frescoes — Protopapas — indicates he held a position of importance in the Greek Orthodox church.

The first bout of destruction was discovered by the villagers who notified the police, local heritage officials and the Orthodox Church immediately. The locks were changed but nothing else was done to protect the church, and the thieves just waltzed right back in five days later and hacked at the walls some more. The ease with which this offense was perpetrated has led some heritage advocates to suspect that the police may have been involved, or at least paid off.

Albania is a very bad space right now when it comes to heritage protection. Since the fall of the communist regime in 1991, more the 2,000 icons have been stolen from churches and museums. In the past two years alone, 20 Orthodox churches and monasteries have been targeted by looters. In 2007, the Ministry of Culture eliminated the custodian system which, while fairly weak, at least ensured that sites of cultural and historical importance were guarded by a living breathing human being. It was cheap, too. The guards were paid €30 ($40) a month, for a total yearly cost to the government of just €40,000 ($54,000).

I don’t care how broke they are, there is no way that this program had to be eliminated purely to save costs. In fact, after years of protests from Orthodox officials and heritage advocates, in 2011 the government budgeted €200,000 ($266,000) for cultural heritage protection. This did not assuage the people concerned about the decimation of Albania’s history, because it’s a ludicrously paltry sum.

The Ministry of Culture is irritatingly fatalistic about this ongoing disaster. Head of the heritage department Olsi Lafe said at a press conference last week that they are working with the police on the thefts at Valsh, but there isn’t much they can do on the larger problem. They have too much territory, much of it rural, to cover effectively.

“Considering the large number of religious heritage monuments, it’s impossible to protect them 24-hours a day,” the ministry said. “It would require a large number of people and a special administrative structure,” it added.

Yes it’s amazing how significant programs require manpower and funding. Shocking news there.

Greek police have recovered all 76 artifacts stolen from the Museum of the History of the Olympic Games in Olympia in February of this year. On February 17th, 2012 two masked men, one of them carrying an AK-47, disabled the alarm, broke into the museum and held up the sole security guard during a shift change. It appears the thieves picked the wrong museum, confusing the smaller Olympics-themed museum with the larger Archaeological Museum of Olympia. They demanded that the security guard hand over a pair of gold wreaths. When she pointed out that there are no such artifacts in that particular museum and refused to help them steal anything else, they tied her up and gagged her. They then smashed and grabbed indiscriminately, ultimately making off with 75 bronze and clay artifacts and one gold signet ring.

It was that ring, the most valuable of the stolen objects, which led police to the thieves. The ring is of royal provenance, having been discovered in a royal chamber tomb in Antheia, a town in the Peloponnese region of Messenia. It dates to the late Bronze Age Mycenaean period, from around 1400 B.C. The large oval crown depicts two male athletes leaping over a bull. The gold ring was on loan from a museum in Messenia when it was stolen.

After lying low for nine months, the thieves attempted to sell the ring to a buyer who turned out to be an undercover police officer. Their initial asking price was 1.5 million euros ($1,943,000) which was reduced via haggling to a paltry 300,000 euros ($387,000). Just in case it wasn’t obvious enough they were dealing in stolen goods, that price drop would have confirmed it beyond a doubt. First the wrong museum, then the attempted sale to a cop, then the awful negotiating skills. These guys were such amateurs I almost feel sorry for them. Almost.

The man attempting to sell the ring was arrested. Upon interrogation, he turned over his co-conspirators. On November 24th, police announced the arrest of three men staying in a hotel in the city of Patra just a few miles from the museum. One was a 50-year-old contractor from Patra, the second a 36-year-old unemployed man from Patra and the third, considered the “mastermind” of this heist, if such a term can be applied, is a 41-year-old unemployed man originally from Patra but now residing in Athens where he sells trinkets to make a living. So yeah, amateurs. They thought they could make a quick buck selling gold only to find that they went to the wrong place and then couldn’t sell any of the objects they’d stolen. Two other suspects are still at large, a 58-year-old man and a 33-year-old, both from Patra.

It’s notable that all the suspects are Greek. The museum security guard said at the time of the theft that they spoke broken Greek. She thought they might have been Albanian, and at the time police did pursue some Albanian jewel thieves thinking they might have had a hand in the museum caper as well. See the links in Conflict Antiquities’ rundown for more details on the police investigation and the various international avenues that now appear to have been abandoned.

Several artifacts were found on the alleged thieves, and once they were arrested, the suspects revealed the location of the rest of the stolen artifacts. The thieves had put them in a bag and buried them in a field two miles from the scene of the crime. The gold ring, a bronze statuette of a victorious athlete, a number of clay lamps, bronze tripods, bronze wheels, charioteers, clay and bronze horses and bulls, everything stolen was found. (Again, see the excellent Conflict Antiquities blog for pictures and descriptions of every stolen artifact.) They will be returned to the museum next week.

Two years ago, police in El Alto, a suburb of the Bolivian seat of government La Paz, arrested a woman who had been caught during a routine search by postal workers attempting to mail the mummy of a toddler to an address in Compiègne, France. She claimed she had no idea what was inside the package, that she had simply received it in Desaguadero, a small town near the border with Peru, from a man she knew only as Don Gustavo who had instructed her to mail it to France. The mummy was confiscated by the police and then transferred to the Bolivian Ministry of Culture’s Archaeology Unit, which conducted a detailed examination of the artifact.

Investigations since then haven’t contradicted her story, but not many specifics have been uncovered. There’s little doubt the mummy was destined to be sold in France. Smugglers had replaced the missing left leg with the mummified leg of a younger child and added three textiles to the two original cotton and cameloid wool pieces in order to complete the mummy so it would sell for a higher price. The textiles identified the mummy as Peruvian rather than Bolivian (Bolivian mummies were wrapped in straw). Archaeologists believe it dates to the pre-Inca Late Intermediate period (1000 A.D.-1450 A.D.), possibly from one of the southern coastal cultures like the Chiribaya or Paracas.

In keeping with the Convention for the Recuperation of Cultural Goods and Others Stolen, Imported or Exported Illicitly, a bilateral agreement signed by Bolivia and Peru in 1998 and ratified in 2000, the little mummy was officially returned to Peru in a ceremony at the Peruvian Foreign Ministry in Lima on Tuesday, November 6th. This is the first time Bolivia has repatriated human remains to the country from which they were looted. Peru didn’t add skeletal and mummified human remains to its “red list” of cultural heritage goods endangered by illegal export until 2009. Until recently, most of the looted and trafficked artifacts from Peru were textiles, ceramics, jewels, precious metals and stones. There’s been a notable increase in the trafficking of human remains since the financial crisis, sadly.

The repatriation of the toddler mummy, in addition to being a function of the pre-existing bilateral agreement, was also the symbol of a new pact signed at Tuesday’s ceremony. In recognition of their shared Andean culture, Bolivia and Peru have agreed to a plan of action to combat the trafficking of cultural patrimony that will engage not just both governments but also private companies in the recovery of looted artifacts. The document was signed by Peruvian Minister of Culture Luis Peirano and Bolivian Culture Minister Pablo Groux. It is their hope that this plan will help fight trafficking between the bordering nations and serve as a signal to other countries to respect their cultural heritage.

Peruvian Foreign Minister Rafael Roncagliolo spoke during the ceremony, saying that the new agreement will improve procedures and techniques used to combat the trade in illegal artifacts. They won’t be relying only on police work, but principally creating a program of academic and archaeological cooperation between Bolivia and Peru that will be vital to the formulation of a common strategy of heritage protection. Since, like the traffic in drugs and weapons, cultural property trafficking is large-scale organized crime that has elaborate networks in many countries at once, in order for one country to combat it, it must work closely together with other countries. These agreements can pave the way to allow for the repatriation of cultural artifacts with a minimum of complex, time-consuming and expensive bureaucracy.

The traffic in Peruvian artifacts is endemic throughout Latin America.

An archaeologist at Argentina’s National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Thought, Julio Avalos, said he and his colleagues are frequently called by police to assess whether relics encountered at airports and Buenos Aires’ seaport — or for sale on the Internet — are protected patrimony.

“Most of it is Peruvian because that’s what there is mostly,” Avalos said.

Just last year three skulls and a mummy from the pre-Incan Paracas culture (7th c. B.C.-3rd c. A.D.) of coastal Peru were intercepted by customs agents in Argentina. They had been sent in the mail from (you guessed it) Bolivia to an Argentine citizen in Buenos Aires and were spotted when the package, labeled as containing replica Peruvian ceramics, was X-rayed in the post office. The recipient was detained on smuggling charges, but officials believe the ultimate destination for the trafficked human remains was yet again the European antiquities market.

More than one hundred feet of gravestones, paving stones and coping stones have been stolen from the churchyard of the Old Bell Chapel (also known as the Brontë Bell Chapel because Patrick Brontë, father of the literary sisters, was the curate there from 1815 to 1820) in the West Yorkshire village of Thornton. It appears to have been a multi-stage plan involving multiple robbers.

Members of the Old Bell Chapel Action Group, who have worked assiduously for 12 years to restore this historic chapel and cemetery from 150 years of neglect into a beautiful, welcoming site for history, nature and literature buffs alike to enjoy, first saw that coping stones had been torn from a wall outside the chapel on Wednesday, October 17th. On the morning of Saturday the 20th, they arrived to find even more devastation: paving stones from the Brontë Way footpath had been pried up and stolen, as were three horizontal grave slabs and 15 grave toppers from the cemetery.

The grave slabs are huge, each of them six feet long, three feet wide, and four to six inches deep. Two have been marking the final resting places of the children of John and Mary Pickles and the daughter of Hannah and James Abbott since the 1820s. The third grave slab does not have a name inscribed, but it dates to 1790. It must have required a great deal of strength to pry up and remove these heavy slabs of solid rock. Police estimate that you would need four men to lift just one of them. The 15 York stone grave toppers stolen are not as large as the gravestones, but are nonetheless ponderous, heavy pieces. This isn’t the kind of thing you’d do on the spur of the moment. The theft required tools, organization and manpower, in addition to a callous disregard for history and human dignity, of course.

Police ask that anyone with information about the thefts contact the North Bradford Neighbourhood Policing Team by calling 101. You can also report anything suspicious to CrimeStoppers at 0800 555 111. Meanwhile, police are patrolling the grounds regularly and have reached out to local stonemasons asking them to report anybody attempting to sell the looted stones. The large grave slabs are inscribed, some in more detail than the headstones, so they’ll be impossible to sell to buyers with any sense and morals. The paving and coping stones, on the other hand, have no distinguishing marks. Recycled York stone, the older the better, is an extremely popular material for landscape design and decorative construction. It’s durable and weathers beautifully.

The Old Bell Chapel Action Group is hoping against hope that at least the gravestones, which are irreplaceable, may be found discarded somewhere. The publicity this dastardly act has garnered may hinder the robbers’ attempts to profit and force them to dump the highly recognizable pieces. Meanwhile, the organization is looking into security cameras and SmartWater, an ingenious anti-theft liquid that contains microscopic chemical particles encoded with a unique signature that glows under UV light. It identifies stolen property like DNA identifies people, and when found on a suspect, it ties them conclusively to the stolen object or the place where it was stolen.

These security measures cost money, money which this small, dedicated group of history lovers does not have. To donate, call Steve Stanworth at 07786 028 889 or email at this address. You can also follow them on Facebook to stay apprised of the investigation and rebuilding efforts.

The Action Group had already increased fundraising efforts this year, selling commemorative plates and some lovely Christmas cards in honor of the 400th anniversary of the construction of Old Bell Chapel. There was an even earlier church known as Saint Leonard’s built in 1587 (the date stone is part of the walls of the chapel today), but in 1612 it was rebuilt from scratch and called Saint James’ Church.

By the time Patrick Brontë arrived 200 years later, the chapel was dilapidated. The growing Dissenter movements of the 17th and 18th centuries had turned many people from the small, cramped Anglican church to its Independent Congregationalist competition, the Kipping Chapel. It was still a popular spot for burials, though. The churchyard has seen 6000 burials from 1597 until the last one in 1965, and up until Patrick’s time, people could pay extra and be buried under the floor of the church itself. Brontë put a stop to that practice because it was making the church smell awful. He also spearheaded a major renovation of the church in 1818, rebuilding the south walls with windows and erecting a bell tower.

Although the nearby village of Haworth where the children grew up and Emily and Charlotte would write their masterpieces is more widely associated with Patrick’s clutch of world-famous children, the five of them born during his curacy of St. James’ Church were baptized there: Elizabeth (baptized August 26th, 1815), Charlotte (June 29th, 1816), Patrick Branwell (July 23rd, 1817), Emily (August 26th, 1818) and Ann (March 25th, 1820). The baptismal font they all used still exists. It has been moved across the street to the current Saint James’ Church, built in 1872 to replace the old church which had fallen into disrepair after Patrick Brontë took the Perpetual Curacy of Haworth and moved the family there in April 1820.

It was a crumbling ruin ceded to the wilderness when the Old Bell Chapel Action Group took it upon themselves to clear and preserve it starting in 2000. They cleared the brush, revealing the remaining walls of the chapel and opening the cemetery so locals could visit their ancestors’ and relatives’ graves and Brontë lovers could pay homage to where it all began.

A medieval bronze jug of great rarity and historical significance stolen from a museum in Luton, Bedfordshire, England this May has been found by the Bedfordshire police. The Wenlok Jug was stolen in a smash-and-grab burglary the night of May 12th from the Stockwood Discovery Centre. At 11:22 PM, the thief, his face wrapped with a scarf to stymie the CCTV cameras, climbed the museum’s fence, broke down the door and used a drain cover to smash through the half-inch thick laminated glass and polycarbonate compound of the display case. He took the jug and ran.

The museum’s insurance company offered a reward of £25,000 for the jug’s safe return because there was immense concern that the burglar planned to sell the 13-pound bronze artifact simply for its scrap value, a mere £20 ($32). The value to the museum was inestimable, both because of its market price and because of its national and regional importance. It is one of a very few datable medieval bronze jugs to bear the maker’s mark of an English bronze founder, possibly a bell founder, although the exact mark has not been found among extant medieval bells yet.

The tankard is a foot tall and is decorated with coats of arms, including Plantagenet royal arms used between 1340 and 1405 and East Anglian arms, probably relating to the foundry. There are other royal and noble symbols — crowns, badges — decorating the jug, plus a dedication to “MY LORD WENLOK” inscribed all in capitals around the bottom half. There are two possible candidates for the Lord Wenlok in question. One is William Wenlock, Archdeacon of Rochester and canon of King’s Chapel, Westminster and of St. Paul’s Cathedral, who died in 1391 and is buried under St. Mary’s Parish Church of Luton. He wasn’t a lord in the sense of having the official title, but he was an important figure in local life and in the church hierarchy, so he could have been referred to as a lord for jug purposes.

The other is his great-nephew John, the first and only official Lord Wenlock, who fought and served under every king from Henry V to Edward IV. He was Chief Butler of England from 1461 to 1469, so the Wenlok Jug could well have been used to serve royalty. He was a Member of Parliament for Bedfordshire throughout the 1430s and 1440s, was High Sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire in 1444 and was elected Speaker of the House in 1455. His family seat was Someries Castle in Luton which, since he changed sides twice during the Wars of the Roses, was forfeited to the crown after he died fighting (not very well, by some accounts, which claim he was killed by his commanding officer the Duke of Somerset for failing to press forward in support of him) for Henry VI at the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471.

Both Wenlocks lived in Luton. The family bought the Manor of Luton in 1377 and lived there until John built Someries. Their names are on the town’s medieval guild register, and there’s a Wenlock Street in town. St. Mary’s Church also has a Wenlock Chapel with a stained glass window depicting Lord Wenlock in his knightly finery.

There are only two other medieval bronze jugs like it known to exist. One is in the British Museum, the other in the Victoria and Albert. They differ in size, color and decorative details, but they all share a number of characteristics. They’re the same pot-bellied shape, although the British Museum piece looks quite different because it’s the only one of the three to have retained its lid. The other two had lids originally, but only the hinges are left now. All three inscriptions say different things, but they’re done in similar, and may I say awesome, Lombardic-style lettering. They all bear the same age royal arms (1340-1405).

Even under the surface the three pieces show themselves to be related. A study of the three done by the British Museum found that they are made of the same alloy of copper, tin and lead known as leaded bronze. This was a popular material, but the jugs have the same impurities in the metal which suggests all three were cast at the same foundry. X-rays show that they were manufactured using the same technique — molten bronze poured into a mould with a front part, a back part and a core — which again was popular at the time. Unusual, however, was the use of metal spacers inside the moulds that ensured the metal would flow freely between the outer casing and the core. All three jugs used these spacers.

The Wenlok Jug is the smallest of the three but bears the earliest maker’s mark. It’s also the most recent discovery. Nobody knew it existed until it was found in a cellar at Easton Neston, Northamptonshire, the stately home of Lord Alexander Hesketh which he sold to a Russian retail store magnate in July 2005. Sotheby’s auctioned off some of the contents in May of that year, the Wenlok Jug among them. It was purchased at that auction by a London dealer for £568,000 ($920,000). In October 2005, the dealer sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for £750,000 ($1,200,000).

Given its extreme rarity, its connection to two similar pieces at the two top museums in the country, the royal arms and the medieval maker’s mark, the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest run by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council declared it of national importance and outstanding significance for the study of medieval metallurgy. Culture Minister David Lammy promptly put a temporary export ban on the jug. The deal with these export bans is if a museum in-country can come up with the same amount of money the foreign entity spent on the purchase, then the local museum gets to buy it.

The Luton Council’s museum service, anxious to secure a masterpiece with such a close connection to the city for themselves and for the nation, stepped up to the plate. In the world of museums, it doesn’t get more David and Goliath than this. The Luton museum’s total yearly acquisition budget is £2,500 ($4,000). The Met spent $36.5 million on art purchases between June 2010 and June 2011, and that’s just a fraction of its overall acquisitions endowment of $632 million.

By hook and by crook, Luton scrounged up the £750,000 it needed to buy the jug out from under the Met. The bulk came from large grants. They got £137,500 from the National Art Collections Fund and £590,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. They raised another £20,000 in donations from museum supporters, individuals, local organizations and small trusts. Throw in the museum’s annual acquisition budget and that makes exactly £750,000. They secured the Wenlok Jug at the end of February 2006, and in May it went on display at the Wardown Park Museum.

In 2008 it was moved to the newly constructed Stockwood Discovery Centre where it remained on display until the burglary earlier this year. The Bedfordshire police have been investigating the crime ever since it happened, and their doggedness has now paid off. They discovered the purloined jug on the morning of Monday, September 24th at a home in Tadworth, Surrey. Officers arrested two people at the scene. One has been charged with handling stolen property and the other is now out on bail pending further investigations. Museum experts have examined the jug today and confirmed it is the authentic artifact.

Police haven’t closed the investigation — they are still asking the public for any information they might have about the theft — but the Wenlok Jug is back home. The relief at the museum must be palpable. There was no replacing this piece. Even if they had the money, which obviously they do not, there simply isn’t another one like it.

Water levels in the Vistula River in Warsaw, Poland, are at historic lows due to a long, hot summer of drought. Last week the water level measured at just 24 inches, the lowest it’s been since testing began in 1799. With the riverbed exposed, a treasure trove of 17th century architectural stonework has been revealed. Experts believe the large marble and alabaster pieces were looted from Warsaw’s Royal Castle during the Swedish invasion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1655-60.

The period is known as The Deluge because of the vast devastation wreaked by the Swedish army. Poland’s cultural heritage was of particular interest to the Sweden since profit was one of the main motivations for the invasion. Churches, mansions, palaces and castles were stripped of any contents of value — jewels, clothing, paintings, tapestries, carpets, furnishings, statues, porcelain, religious relics, historical archives, books, manuscripts — and once they took everything that wasn’t nailed down, they moved on to the stuff that was. Floors, columns, decorative friezes, fountains, steps, door frames, doors, window casings, mantelpieces, chimneys, gates, were looted from Poland and Lithuania’s historic buildings.

Warsaw, replete with palaces, was particularly hard-hit having been sacked no less than three times during the war. The Royal Castle was so devastated that it had to be completely rebuilt in the last two decades of the 17th century.

Swedish troops loaded the booty onto barges and floated it up the Vistula to Gdansk where it was loaded onto ships which carried it on the short journey over the Baltic Sea to Sweden. Not all of the boats made it to their destination. Some of them, probably due to overloading from the literal tons of building parts they were carrying, sank on the Vistula before they even got out of Warsaw.

In 2009, the University of Warsaw led an interdisciplinary study of the spoil ships, searching historical maps, archives, libraries for references to treasure at the bottom of the river. They found several references to cargo tumbling off the boats into the river and to overloaded barges sinking in the Vistula in 1655 and 1656. They also researched news articles from 1906 reporting that sand barge operators on the 517th kilometer of the Vistula had found a number of large stone monuments on the bottom of the river. They were able to recover some of them from the riverbed and give them to museums in Warsaw. One marble sculpture looted from garden of Kazimierz Palace was returned to the reconstructed Kazimierz Palace, now the seat of Warsaw University.

Although the sand barge operators said that there was more to be recovered, including one massive marble eagle which fell back into the water when the rope snapped during their attempt to raise it, there were no further attempts to recover the looted treasure for the next century. The University of Warsaw research team spent the rest of 2009 and the first half of 2010 scanning the river with state-of-the-art sonar, side-scan sonar and sub-bottom profilers to measure the riverbed and create a detailed grid map. They found several anomalies to investigate.

Unfortunately a deluge of the natural variety interrupted them. The Vistula flooded in late May and June of 2010, destroying many homes, drowning farmland and killing dozens of people. The recurring flood waters covered the riverbed with thick layers of silt and debris, obscuring the objects that had been detected. The waters remained high for the next few months, preventing any recovery efforts but allowing the team to do further research in areas that were previously to shallow for the ships to navigate.

In 2011, the researchers enlisted diving teams to explore and excavate any artifacts they might find. Using barge-mounted cranes, they were able to recover a dozens of pieces of architectural stonework and sculptural elements, most importantly a marble triangle with the coat of arms of the Vasa family carved on its face. It dates to around 1610, and came either from the Royal Castle or the Kazimierz Palace. (If the name Vasa seems familiar, it’s because it’s the name of a famous Swedish warship so named after Sweden’s royal family at the time, a branch of which also ruled the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth when Sweden invaded).

After all that hard work, this summer another weather extreme has made side-scan sonar and sub-bottom profilers obsolete, and archaeologists have gladly taken advantage of the pendulum swing. Many of the artifacts have been recovered and are in storage awaiting conservation. Others will join them soon. In the meantime, police are patrolling the riverbank to keep looters from repeating history. The large size of many of the pieces makes casual looting unlikely, but determined ones will stop at nothing. It’s dangerous to attempt to walk on the riverbed. A mine from World War II has been discovered, and there could be all kinds of unexploded ordnance hidden in the mud.

So far the artifacts are in surprisingly good condition despite having been violently detached from their original locations and then having spent 350 years under water. Their unwieldiness make them tricky to display, but they are invaluable to historians because between The Deluge and the many, many wars of conquest Poland suffered after that one, there is very little left in the historical record about the original Royal Castle. These pieces tell a dramatic story of how thoroughly the Swedish army plundered Warsaw, true, but they also provide priceless details about the construction of the castle.

More recent artifacts attesting to another dark chapter in Polish history have also been found in the shallow Vistula. Earlier this month Rafał Rachciński discovered a stone slab inscribed in Hebrew on a sandbar in the middle of the river. He reported the find to the press and archaeological authorities. When he returned a few days later with members of Virtual Shtetl, the web the portal of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, they found more artifacts with Hebrew inscriptions.

They’re the remains of matzevots, Jewish headstones, which somehow made their way to center of the Vistula riverbed. Historians believe they may have come from Bródno Cemetery, the largest cemetery in Warsaw, which although Catholic has a section in the northeast reserved for people of other religions or no religion. It’s possible the headstones were destroyed during World War II and then used as fill to pave the riverbed after the war.

Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Madonna under the Fir Tree is one of the master’s most elaborate and highly prized Madonnas, completed around 1510 for the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Breslau, Bohemia (now Wroclaw, Poland). It hung in the Chapel of St. John in the cathedral’s north aisle, a staple of travel guides and art histories, for more than 400 years.

Breslau was part of Germany during both World Wars, and its overwhelming majority-German population supported the Nazi party from the early 30s. To keep it safe from Allied bombing raids, Cranach’s Madonna was taken down and hidden in 1943. First it was moved to a Cistercian monastery, and then to the city of Klodzko 55 miles southwest of Breslau.

The first air attack on Breslau didn’t take place until the Soviet air force struck in July of 1944, and the damage was not extensive. The city basically managed to avoid the war beyond some Polish resistance sabotage until the approaching Red Army laid siege to the city in February of 1945. The church officials who removed the Madonna may have had other concerns as well, namely keeping their Cranach instead of seeing it spirited away to Hitler’s pet art collection project, the Führermuseum in Linz, Austria.

The Siege of Breslau lasted three months, ending on May 6th, 1945, just two days before armistice and the end of the war in Europe. The city which had survived virtually unscathed during five years of war was reduced to rubble in the last three months of it courtesy of Red Army artillery and Soviet Air Army bombing. The Cathedral of St. John the Baptist was one of the hardest hit buildings with 70% of its construction destroyed. Its aisles, including the north aisle where the Madonna had once hung, were in ruins.

Under the terms of the Potsdam Conference held in July of 1945, Breslau was transferred to Poland and renamed Wroclaw. A mass exodus of its German population followed. Between 1945 and 1949, ethnic Germans either fled the city or were forced out while ethnic Poles were forced in by population transfers from newly annexed Soviet territories.

With this massive dislocation and ethnic conflict as the backdrop, the Madonna was taken out of hiding and brought to the Diocesan Museum in Wroclaw, since returning it to the cathedral was not possible. During its war-time vicissitudes, the painting had been broken horizontally in two pieces, so diocesan officials commissioned Siegfried Zimmer, a priest, art collector and painter, to restore it. Siegfried Zimmer was also German. Between 1946 and 1947, while he restored the Cranach, he had a forgery made. He gave the fake to the diocese and then moved to Berlin with the authentic Madonna under the Fir Tree.

The fraud wasn’t discovered until a Polish conservator examined the painting in 1961 and found a nasty surprise. For decades the Madonna was missing. Rumors of it being sold in the private art collection market popped up on occasion, but the authorities were never able to track it down. Finally the painting found its way into the clutches of, you guessed it, an anonymous Swiss collector who kept it on the down low until his recent death. He bequeathed it to the Diocese of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

In March of this year, Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Office for the Restitution of Cultural Goods found out the Cranach was in St. Gallen and began negotiations to get it back. On Friday, July 27, in an official return ceremony, Minister Radoslaw Sikorski handed the Madonna under the Fir Tree over to Bishop Andrzej Siemieniewski of the Wroclaw Diocese.

“We pass on to the church authorities the most treasured recovered artifact in the history of free Poland since 1990,” Minister Sikorski said.

The cathedral was mostly rebuilt by 1951 with the final tower restoration being completed in 1991, so the canvas can now return to its home of four centuries.

An exquisite yellow marble sarcophagus carved in high relief with quadrigae (four-horse chariots) racing at the Circus Maximus has been returned to its hometown of Aquino, about 60 miles south of Rome, 21 years after it was stolen from the Church of Santa Maria della Libera. The sarcophagus, a masterpiece of Roman funerary art from the late second to third century A.D., had been used as the church’s central altar since 1948 where it remained without incident until 1991.

Thieves, taking advantage of renovations on site, first stole it in August of 1991, but it was immediately found and brought back to the church. That turned out not to be the wisest of choices. During the night of September 2-3, 1991, thieves stole the sarcophagus again and this time it disappeared into the dark channels of the antiquities trade.

Authorities searched high and low for the piece, publishing pictures of it on international lists of stolen works, but some of the details were wrong (the material was listed as alabaster instead of marble and the dimensions were inaccurate). Still, it’s not like there are dozens of sarcophagi just like this one floating around. It’s entirely one of a kind. Yet, for 20 years it was nowhere to be found.

Last summer, the state prosecutor’s office was contacted by the executor of the estate of a recently deceased collector/antiquities trafficker who had apparently purchased the sarcophagus in 1991 for around one million dollars. The piece was the star of this unnamed person’s London collection, a collection that was in danger of being split up between two more unnamed collectors, one Russian and one American. The executor wanted to see the sarcophagus returned to Italy before the collection was broken up, so he reached out to state prosecutor Maurizio Fiorilli who has been at the forefront of Italy’s legal campaign against looting and the dealers and curators who finance it.

Fiorilli alerted the Archaeological Patrimony squad of the Guardia di Finanza (an Italian law enforcement agency that focuses on financial crimes), and Operation Juvenal, named after the late 1st/early 2nd century Roman satirical poet who was born in Aquino, was launched. The Guardia di Finanza secured a warrant to seize the artifact in London. There was a condition, though. The executor of the estate would voluntarily return the sarcophagus to the Italian embassy in London only if its deceased owner could remain anonymous. The police and prosecutor agreed, and on April 16th, 2012, a large box containing the sarcophagus was delivered to the embassy. There was no return address or name of sender on the box.

We don’t know who this collector was. The cops aren’t talking as investigations are ongoing. Rumor has it the culprit was high society antiquities dealer/thief/fence Robert Hecht, who was on trial in Italy for antiquities trafficking from 2005 until the statute of limitations ran out in January of 2012, but it doesn’t seem to me that the particulars fit. He died in February, just a month after his case was dropped, so it would be odd for the executor of his estate to be contacting the authorities last summer, especially since he was still on trial then. Wouldn’t any haggling have been up to his criminal attorneys? Also, he died in Paris, not London. Also, he had quality contacts among the looters and middlemen of Italy. I doubt he would have paid a million dollars in the first place, and certainly not unless he had a museum curator with five million dollars burning a hole in his or her pocket.

Two months after its arrival at the Italian embassy in London, the sarcophagus was sent to Rome on a cargo flight, escorted by Guardia di Finanza commander Massimo Rossi and his gendarmes. It arrived the evening of Wednesday, July 18th. The next day it was revealed in all its glory at a press conference in Rome, and then trucked to Aquino where it was greeted with tears of joy by the locals who had given up hope that they’d ever see it again.

For security reasons, the sarcophagus is being kept in the city museum rather than in the church. The mayor of Aquino, Antonino Grincia, says they hope to be able to return the sarcophagus to the church, “its natural home,” when conditions permit. One hopes that means some sort of anti-theft system is in place, but there are no specifics at the moment.

You might wonder how a sarcophagus depicting a not even remotely Christian chariot race is naturally at home in a church, and as its central altar, no less. The answer is this church is a beautiful example of austere Romanesque architecture, built in the 11th century over the ruins of the Temple of Hercules Liberator (hence Santa Maria della Libera) from marble scavenged off of the many ancient structures in town, including the temple itself. The walls are packed with decorative marble bits and bobs, epigraphs, cornices, funerary reliefs, and metopes (the flat rectangles between decorated pieces of a frieze). I’ve seen a lot of churches made out of a lot of recycled Roman marble, but this collage style is really something special. You can observe the beautifully severe jumble of antiquity and Middle Ages in this YouTube video.

The sarcophagus was actually discovered on the church site during a 19th century excavation. After its initial discovery, the sarcophagus was moved to the nearby palace of the seminary where it was put on display in the atrium. The palace was damaged by Allied bombing in 1944, so after the war the sarcophagus was moved to the church which had survived the war just like it had survived the previous thousand years. Towards the beginning of those thousand years, incidentally, Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Doctor Angelicus, author of the Summa Theologica, was baptized in that very church. Aquinas is a Latin demonym meaning “from Aquino.”

Acting on a tip from intelligence agencies, early on Friday Karachi police intercepted a truck carrying a 20-foot container full of ancient Buddhist artifacts hidden under brooms, slippers, furniture and bales of straw. There were 300 artifacts in the back of that truck, include massive statues that required specialized heavy machinery to unload.

Most of the artifacts date to around the third century and come from the kingdom of Gandhara, an ancient Vedic and later Buddhist civilization in the Peshawar valley that stretched from northern Pakistan to the Kabul River in eastern Afghanistan. The statues mostly depict enlightened beings, like an ornamented, mustachioed Bodhisattva that weighs 2,200 pounds and a Jataka (a birth story of the Buddha) tablet that shows Queen Maya giving birth to Prince Siddhartha while spirits celebrate around her. Another important statue depicts the goddess Hariti with two of her children, who in Gandharan tradition was once a baby-devouring demon but who was taught a stern lesson when the Buddha kidnapped one of her hundreds of children. She converted to Buddhism and become a loving mother goddess.

Truck driver Zafar Ali and another man traveling with him were arrested. Ali claimed they were headed to Rawalpindi, but a delivery order found after a search of his belongings said the cargo was to be transported to Sialkot City. He fingered his boss, Asif Butt, who told the authorities that the truck was loaded in the middle of the night with innocuous broom sticks and shoes from three legitimate businesses, but then a fourth person asked them to load five big and eight small boxes and bring them to Sialkot. Butt of course denies knowing what was in those boxes, one of which, let’s not forget, weighed more than 2,000 pounds, but he’s more than willing to snitch out the man who gave them the boxes.

Police suspected most of the artifacts were stolen from museums, primarily the Swat Museum which is known for its large collection of Buddhist artifacts from the Gandhara era, but after examining the antiquities Qasim Ali Qasim, the director of the Sindh province archaeology and museums department, told the police they were more likely to have been looted from archaeological sites in Swat, which is currently mired in military anti-Islamist operations. Looters have been taking full advantage of the distracted authorities to help themselves to the rich history of Buddhist and Hindu art in the area. Qasim thinks the objects were looted individually and moved to Karachi in small shipments. Once they had a large group, they planned to truck them out of Karachi and out of Pakistan with deep-pocketed European antiquities markets as the final destination.

The information retrieved from the suspects in yesterday’s bust has produced immediate results. A raid on a Karachi warehouse on Saturday uncovered two more boxes of Gandhara kingdom artifacts, including statues of the Buddha, bronze artifacts, pottery and decorative plaques. They’re investigating whether this is part of a larger smuggling ring (it is).

The Codex Calixtinus is an illuminated 12th century manuscript collection of stories, sermons, prayers, and chants, as well as a travel guide with road directions and local customs for pilgrims to the shrine of Saint James in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. It has been kept in the cathedral archives for more than 800 years, the primary jewel of the collection and one of Spain’s greatest cultural treasures.

On Tuesday, July 5, 2011, cathedral staff noticed that it was missing from a reinforced case in the archive room. After a frantic search turned up nothing, they called the police. It seems that the manuscript had been stolen as early as Sunday, but large security loopholes allowed the thieves to strike without anybody realizing for days. Cameras were supposed to be trained on the manuscript case at all times, but none of the active cameras in the room were pointing at the Codex Calixtinus. In theory, only two archivists and the cathedral dean had access to the archive room, so they apparently got complacent about securing the case itself. They couldn’t confirm if the case had been locked before the theft. The door to the archive room was not forced open. Then, to top it all off, the manuscript wasn’t even insured.

It was a major scandal. The Spanish press dubbed it the “theft of the century.” Authorities initially suspected the theft might have been commissioned by a black market manuscript dealer (a go-to theory whenever important art is stolen that never seems to pan out) and feared the Codex was smuggled out of the country before the theft was even discovered. The truth was a little closer to home.

On Wednesday, July 4, 2012, the police found the stolen Codex Calixtinus in a garbage bag inside a cardboard box in the garage of a former cathedral caretaker in Milladoiro, just a few miles from Santiago de Compostela. The day before they had arrested four suspects — the caretaker, Manuel Fernández Castañeiras, his wife, his son and the son’s girlfriend. Under interrogation, Castañeiras confessed to the crime but would not tell them where he stashed the loot. It seems his son spilled the beans in the end.

This is raw video of the garage with the invaluable medieval codex in a garbage bag in a box against the wall. (My apologies for the autoplay which I can’t figure out how to disable.)

EDIT: I’ve removed the embed because the autoplay is just too annoying. Watch the video here.

An initial examination of the Codex Calixtinus indicates that it’s in excellent condition, despite its highly questionable storage circumstances over the past year. The police also found €1.2 million ($1.5 million) in cash, several other books stolen from the cathedral and a silver tray. They also found a set of keys to the cathedral. I shudder to think of how Castañeiras got his grubby mitts on that million and a half. At this point in the investigation, the police think he may have pilfered cash and valuables donated to the cathedral by pilgrims over the course of decades.

So yet again the mysterious theft first attributed to nebulous underworld characters turns out to be the work of an insider. In this case, it was the most classic of insider thieves: the disgruntled former employee. After 25 years working for the cathedral as an electrician and all around handyman, Castañeiras had been let go in early 2011 ostensibly due to restructuring. The Bishopric wanted to standardize employment and Castañeiras was a contract worker, so he got the chop. Rumor has it that was a cover story, however, and he was really fired because he was suspected of those petty thefts.

He filed suit against the cathedral for unfair dismissal and was reputed to hold a grudge against the dean. The suit was ongoing when the theft occurred. Also ongoing was his habit of going to Mass at the cathedral every day, a routine which didn’t stop until he was arrested.