The History Blog

The city of Moscow has launched an innovative program that gets private developers to pay to restore historic properties in “inadequate condition.” It’s really rather ingenious. The city’s Heritage Commission picks properties that are in dire need of repair and offers 49-year leases for a yearly rent determined by auction. The developers pay the market-price rent — they pay the first year of rent up front — while they restore the building to specifications determined by the Heritage Commission. Once the restoration is done and approved, the yearly rent drops to one ruble per square meter for the rest of the 49 year lease.

Last Wednesday the first auction was held, and it was a notable success. Twenty bidders competed in rent auctions for three historical buildings, the mansion of the merchant Morozov family (late 18th-early 19th century), the mansion of merchant Nikolai Baulin (circa 18th century), both on Nikoloyamskaya Street, and architect Konstantin Busse’s 18th-19th century mansion on Podsosensky Pereulok. The final bids for yearly rents ranged from $470,000 to $682,000.

Based on this first auction, which included three historical buildings in various stages of disrepair, the program looks promising. The first buildings included two city-owned mansions and an apartment building [the Baulin mansion], ranging in size from 705 square meters to 993 square meters. The apartment building is half-destroyed, and of the three was the only one on the city’s list of landmarked buildings whose condition is classified as “dangerous.” [...]

Moscow’s Heritage Commission has indicated that there are a total of 244 historical buildings in a precarious state that it would like to have renovated through this program, and has said they have 50 applications from potential investors.

All restorations must be finished within five years of signing the contract, or the lessors will have to pay a fine equal to six months of market rent. The restoration has to be approved by the Heritage Commission. If it’s substandard or shoddy work, it will not be accepted. Presumably that means the rent reduction won’t take place, but I don’t know what other penalties will be applied, if they’ll have to redo the restoration or if the contract will be considered broken and the property offered to someone else.

Obviously oversight is key to the success of this plan. Rejecting the final restoration at the end of five years will not prevent disasters. The city has to keep an eye on the construction to ensure all historical preservation laws are being obeyed and to do ongoing quality assurance. The Department of Cultural Heritage insists that all landmark laws will be enforced, which means that there can be no altering the interior structure to make, say, a warren of hotel rooms, in any officially designated landmark buildings. Not all historic properties have landmark status, however, so in some cases the rules will allow extensive alteration inside as long as the facade and structure are preserved.

For the three buildings auctioned Wednesday, the restoration standard requires that they be returned to their 19th century condition. All work must be done by qualified restoration experts according to strict guidelines developed by the Department of Cultural Heritage for each project.

If there is proper oversight, this could turn out to be an enormous boon for Moscow’s historic architecture and economy and a damn sweet deal for the renters to boot. Developer MR Group estimates that the cost to restore the three buildings that were auctioned Wednesday could range anywhere from $2,500 to $10,000 per square meter, depending on the structures’ conditions. For the 993-square-meter Podsosensky Pereulok mansion, that’s a total restoration price tag of $2.5 million to $10 million.

That would make the restorations cost about four to 15 years of market rent, so assuming they do it right the first time and within the five year limit, investors will be getting at worst 19 years of rent on restored 19th century historic properties in downtown Moscow practically for free.

The city gets someone else to pay to save derelict structures while still owning the properties, plus lots of construction jobs on an ongoing basis. Buildings that would otherwise be vacant/home to squatters will be put to use while Moscow’s historic center preserves and enhances its character instead of just knocking it down. Should it manage to avoid being mired in corruption and look-the-other-wayism, this program might just be crazy enough to work.

Moctezuma’s headdress is a large and elaborate 16th century crown which according to legend once belonged to Aztec emperor Moctezuma II, made from the iridescent green tail feathers of the Resplendent Quetzal. Moctezuma either gave it to Hernán Cortés as a gift upon his arrival at Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire and modern day Mexico City, or it was pillaged by Cortés’ forces after the siege of Tenochtitlan in 1521.

There is no record of where it was taken, nor is there any evidence that it belonged to Moctezuma. We don’t even know for sure that it’s a headdress. It doesn’t match any of the headdresses depicted in contemporary accounts. In the 19th century the assumption was that it was a mantle, and recent scholarship suggests they might have been right about it being a mantle, but that it was worn by a priest to ritually transform him into the incarnation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, rather than by the king.

What we do know is that by 1575 it was in the extensive private collection of Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria, at Ambras Castle in Innsbruck. Ferdinand was the nephew of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V who was also King of Spain during the Conquista. He could easily have gotten his hands on the headdress via his family connections.

It remained in the castle until the early 19th century when Vienna’s Museum of Ethnology was entrusted with most of the Castle Ambras collection. The headdress was the subject of much anthropological fascination from then on, including from Zelia Nuttall, the American archaeologist, anthropologist and expert in pre-Columbian Mexico who in 1890 first identified it as an Aztec “quetzalapanecayotl” or a featherwork crown.

The piece is 46 inches high at the peak and 69 inches wide. In addition to the 400 dramatic quetzal tail feathers that adorn the outer layer, there are rows of blue Lovely Cotinga feathers, pink flamingo feathers, smaller quetzal feathers and white and red feathers from the squirrel cuckoo. The inner rings are studded with gold and gemstones. The Aztecs venerated the Resplendent Quetzal as the god of the air, a symbol of rebirth and of freedom.

Given its beauty, historical significance and powerful symbolism, it’s no surprise that the headdress has been the subject of a long-standing dispute between Mexico and Austria. There are no Aztec headdresses left in Mexico because the Spanish took them all — the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City only has a replica of Moctezuma’s headdress on display — so Mexico has been trying for decades to get this one back, even going so far as to petition the United Nations for its return, but to no avail.

In 2008, the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) entered into talks with the Austrian Government and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the parent institution of the Museum of Ethnology. They agreed first to do an extensive scientific analysis on the headdress to assess its condition and do any conservation necessary that will allow the piece to travel. In 2011, a tentative deal was struck: Mexico would officially recognize Austria’s uncontested ownership of the headdress, Austria would loan Mexico the headdress and in return Mexico would loan Austria the golden stagecoach of Maximilian I of Mexico, emperor of the Second Mexican Empire (1863-1867) and brother of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria.

There was still one major stumbling block, however. According to Mexican law, all pre-Columbian artifacts belong to the nation. Once they cross the border, no matter who else might lay claim to them, they become property of the state and cannot leave the country. No matter the terms of the loan agreement, Austria had no intention of letting the headdress into Mexico until the government’s assurances had the force of law.

A new bilateral cultural exchange agreement between Austria and Mexico that would resolve the issue has just been approved by the Mexican Senate and Austria’s cabinet. The Senate’s amendments to the cultural property law allow for long-term loans of artifacts while acknowledging the lender’s ownership rights. Austria’s legislature has to approve the deal, which is expected to happen within the next few months, and both parties need to sort out how to transport the fragile headdress without damaging it, but it looks like the biggest obstacle to the return of this glorious symbol of Mexican heritage might just have been overcome.

The United States has taken a census of the population every 10 years without fail since 1790. Census figures determine how many seats in the House of Representatives are allocated to each state. The first census takers were federal marshals who went door to door recording the name of the head of the household and the number of people in each household. Native Americans were not counted. Only three out of five slaves were counted.

(This is the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise, which stipulated that just three out of five slaves in every state would be counted for the purposes of determining population and thus the number of seats in the House. Slaveholding states wanted all their slaves to count so they could dominate the legislature; non-slaveholding states wanted no slaves counted since they didn’t have the vote, citizenship or even the right not to be sold like so much livestock, and would give the slave states disproportionate power in the House. James Madison suggested the three-fifths figure which was eventually adopted by the Constitutional Convention.)

Throughout the whole of the 19th century and half of the 20th, political districts were responsible for sending out census takers, called enumerators, armed with forms and pencils to canvass door to door. The enumerators would return completed forms to the precinct office where they’d be entered in ink in bound ledger books. This is why historical census records have all kinds of transcription errors and misspellings, not to mention many omissions particularly in rural areas where enumerators would have to travel for miles to find remote farms, many of whose inhabitants made themselves intentionally unreachable. Starting with the 1950 census, enumerators were replaced with forms mailed out to every address on file with the United States Post Office.

By law, all individual census records are sealed for 72 years. Summaries and statistical reports are released as soon as the data is tabulated, but the information about John Smith at 100 Maple Lane is kept under wraps for three score and 12. In the past, the population schedules were only made available on microfilm. With the rise of the Internet and the explosion of online genealogical research, many of those historical census records have been digitized, but researchers had to drag their cookies to a National Archives and Records Administration branch office and go through all the microfilm by hand.

The 1940 Census, its 72 years come round at last, slouches towards the Internet to be born. Now for the first time, census records will be released online. Bookmark this website: 1940 Census Archives, and return to it on April 2nd at 9:00 AM to see the 1940 Census in all its glory.

It really is glorious. This is the only census taken during Franklin Roosevelt’s many presidential administrations and the only one to tabulate the statistical realities of the Great Depression. It included new questions about employment, income, and home ownership vs. renting (see a PDF of a blank 1940 form here), which at the time caused some distrust of the census requiring a major media campaign to reassure Americans their answers would be kept in utmost confidence and framing the census as patriotic duty. Cesar Romero, the future Joker to Adam West’s Batman, pitched the census in a public service film. Pictures of FDR filling in the census form were publicized all over the country.

One not-so-small caveat: the data has not been name indexed yet. The census records are indexed by enumeration district — the geographic area a single census taker could cover in two weeks in an urban center, or in one month in a rural location. Commercial ancestry websites Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org have announced that they’ll create a name index (plus indexes of all the other fields too), but it’ll be some time before they’re done. (Ancestry.com is a pay service, but they’ll allow free access to their index and proprietary search tools through the end of 2013. FamilySearch.org is run by the Mormon church. Access is free and you can even help index the census.) If you want to locate a person using the government website, you’ll have to know where the person lived in order to track down his or her census information.

If you’d like to be ready to hit the records running, you can figure out which enumeration district the person you’re researching lived in. Go to the National Archives’ online public access search page and type “1940 enumeration district descriptions for [city or county]” (without the quotation marks). You’ll get any written descriptions of 1940 Census enumeration districts that include the place you searched for, plus any maps that include it. Track down the address and you’ll see a two part number separated by a hyphen labeling the area. That’s the enumeration district number.

I searched for the tiny town my father was born in just three years before the census and I got three written documents and two maps. I now have both of their enumeration district numbers good to go so I can look up my adorable toddling parents on April 2nd.

If you’re daunted by the prospect, check your local public library for resources. This Michigan public library, for instance, is offering a workshop on locating your family members on the census two days after the release.

For a three minute period overview of the census, see this film created as part of the training for enumerators. Notice the strong emphasis on the confidentiality of the data and on how a full and honest response is the duty of all patriotic citizens.

The National Archives YouTube channel has three other videos from this film that go into further detail on the census-taking process. They’re a tad on the dry side, but fascinating for genealogists, statisticians, social historians, archivists and other assorted nerdly species.

When earlier this month a federal circuit judge ordered Odyssey Marine Exploration to return the vast treasure recovered from the shipwreck code-named “Black Swan” to Spain, I assumed they’d appeal the ruling to a higher court. That’s what they’ve done every other time a judgement went against them in the five years since they first retrieved the gold and silver coins from the Atlantic seabed in May of 2007. I was wrong.

Odyssey did make one last claim in court, but it was already a form of capitulation: they asked that the Spanish government reimburse them $412,814 for storage and preservation costs. On February 18th, US District Court Judge Mark Pizzo denied the claim and ordered the company to grant Spain access to the treasure this week so they could prepare it for transport. Odyssey announced that it would no longer contest Spain’s ownership of the treasure.

Peru isn’t giving up so easily.

On Thursday, the Peruvian government made an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to block transfer of the treasure to give that nation more time to make arguments in federal court about its claim to being the rightful owner.

Peru says the gold and silver was mined, refined and minted in that country, which at the time was part of the Spanish empire. The appeal was directed to Justice Clarence Thomas, who did not indicate when he would respond.

Probably because he’s not gonna. Anyway it’s too late now.

On Thursday evening, two Spanish military Hercules transport planes were loaded with 494,000 silver coins, 100,000 gold coins and assorted artifacts Odyssey Marine delivered to MacDill Air Force Base from their secured storage facility in Sarasota. The treasure of the “Black Swan,” aka the frigate Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes which sank off the coast of Portugal in 1804, is now winging its way to Spain.

Spanish officials counted and weighed the treasure before loading it on the planes. Odyssey actually lowballed the discovery when they announced they had found 17 tons of gold and silver. The total weight was 49,000 pounds, or 24.5 tons. Despite Spain’s floundering economy, massive debt and 23% unemployment, the coins will not be sold or, heaven forfend, melted down. As cultural patrimony, the treasure must by law be preserved intact. The current plan is to divide the coins and display them at a number of museums in Spain.

There’s footage of the cargo being loaded onto the planes and Spanish Ambassador Jorge Dezcallar de Mazarredo’s tarmac statement in this local news story:

Media relations professional, self-educated presidential historian, collector of inauguration memorabilia, pathological liar and thief Barry Landau pleaded guilty in federal court Tuesday to stealing thousands of historical documents from museums including (but not limited to) the Maryland Historical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Connecticut Historical Society, the University of Vermont, the New York Historical Society, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.

According to the plea agreement (pdf), Landau and his Canadian accomplice Jason Savedoff researched their targets online and off, compiling lists of the most valuable documents in the collections. From December 2010 until July 2011, the two of them cut a swath through museum collections, distracting staff with cupcakes then stuffing documents into hidden coat pockets and folders. They also removed any “finding aids,” like card catalogue entries, to make it hard for the museum to realize a document was missing.

Prosecutors said the value of the stolen documents easily exceeded $1 million. One of 60 documents stolen from the Maryland Historical Society was an 1861 land grant signed by Abraham Lincoln to a former member of the Maryland militia who served in the War of 1812. It’s worth $100,000, prosecutors said.

The oldest pilfered document was penned 533 years ago by Lorenzo de Medici during the Italian Renaissance. Among the most revered were three inaugural addresses delivered by Franklin D. Roosevelt, with the president’s handwritten notes and corrections. [...]

Among the items taken from the Pennsylvania archives, prosecutors said, was a 1788 handwritten proclamation by John Hancock regarding the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. [...]

Federal prosecutors have described the scope of the thefts as “truly breathtaking,” with stolen documents that include an endorsement for a judge signed by George Washington, a letter written in French from Marie Antoinette, and an 1874 note from Karl Marx inquiring about the price of a book bearing his signature. [...]

Among the most valuable documents stolen was a letter written in 1780 from Benjamin Franklin to naval hero John Paul Jones about gunpowder deliveries from the French. It is worth several hundred thousand dollars, according to prosecutors.

The court documents filed Tuesday list stolen papers signed by luminaries from a broad swath of history: Susan B. Anthony, John Hancock, John Adams, Robert E. Lee, Sir Isaac Newton, Napoleon and Florence Nightingale. Another item was a letter from Charles Dickens to Edgar Allen Poe.

Back at the lair, they would remove any inventory markings or other institutional references on the document by scrubbing them off using sandpaper or other abrasives. They called this “performing surgery.” The surgeried documents were then either sold or kept in Landau’s apartment.

Landau and Savedoff were caught by a sharp-eyed part-time staffer at the Maryland Historical Society in Mount Vernon on July 9, 2011. David Angerhofer thought the pair were “too schmoozy for regular people,” so he spied on them from a balcony and saw them stuff historical documents under their own papers and called the cops. Savedoff was in the bathroom when the police arrived. They banged on the stall door until he came out. The historical society staffer saw pieces of old-looking paper floating in the toilet but wasn’t able to fish them out right away. When he returned, the toilet had been used and flushed by another visitor.

Landau and Savedoff were arrested and police found 70 documents hidden in a computer bag. Sixty of them belonged to the Maryland Historical Society, including that land grant signed by President Lincoln and presidential inaugural ball invitations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. When the FBI searched Landau’s New York City apartment, they found 10,000 historical documents and ephemera. Experts from the National Archives and Records Administration have been able to trace 4,000 of them to the libraries and museums from whence they were stolen thus far.

Authorities think Landau has been stealing documents for years (President Bill Clinton’s secretary Betty Currie was sure he stole a signed book of the President’s speeches from her home in 2009) but the plea agreement only covers the thefts from December to July. Savedoff pleaded guilty last October to Conspiracy to Commit Theft of Major Artwork and Theft of Major Artwork. Now Landau has pleaded guilty to the same charges. He will be sentenced in May of this year.

This guy is such a despicable skeeze I can’t even. He spent years collecting presidential inauguration memorabilia, promoting himself as this huge expert with a collection that eclipsed even that of the Smithsonian. He was treated as the main expert on inaugurations by major media outlets, actors and film producers, plus a number of Presidents, First Ladies and Congress. Read this article from 2005, but keep a flight sickness bag handy because in hindsight it’s truly nauseating.

Four years ago, when the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies needed plates for the inaugural luncheon, it turned to Landau, who had a collection of china used at Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801. Presidents come and go, but traditions remain, and Landau is the keeper of traditions, the go-to guy.

“I have a letter from Jacqueline Kennedy,” Landau said, “and she wrote: ‘They should make you the Minister of Inaugurations.’ “

In May of 2007, Odyssey Marine Exploration, a privately owned marine treasure-hunting company, discovered a Spanish shipwreck somewhere on the Atlantic seabed. Odyssey refused to divulge the exact location or the name of the ship. They ultimately recovered 17 tons of silver coins, plus almost 100,000 gold coins and a number of other artifacts from the wreck, which they code-named “Black Swan.” The site must have been near Spain because Odyssey secretly landed the $500 million treasure on Gibraltar, chartered a flight and flew the loot back to its headquarters in Tampa, Florida.

Spain was displeased, to put it mildly. Odyssey claimed the find was made in international waters in full compliance with the United Nations’ Law of the Seas, but since they refused to reveal the wreck site and pleaded ignorance about the name of the ship, Spanish authorities got suspicious. They filed suit against Odyssey Marine in a federal courthouse in Tampa, demanding that the company reveal everything it knows about the wreck so Spain could claim ownership, and they got a Spanish court order to seize Odyssey ships around Gibraltar and search them for historical artifacts.

The case has been winding its way through the legal system ever since then. In 2009, a Florida judge declared that the “Black Swan” was the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, a Spanish frigate sunk by the British off the coast of Cape St. Mary, Portugal in 1804, that Odyssey had specifically set out to find the Mercedes and had succeeded, and that Spain was the rightful owner of the recovered treasure. Odyssey’s claims of ignorance did not impress.

The judge argued that the coins, all dated prior to 1804, matched the Mercedes’ haul of mainly silver coins minted in Lima – part of a haul being brought back to finance Spain’s European wars. He also said cannon found there matched those on board the Mercedes.

“The debris field’s location, coins, cannons, and artefacts persuasively match the Mercedes’s historical record,” the judge said.

“That Odyssey, which set out to discover the Mercedes, found this mix strewn about in an area a few football fields square where the vessel met its explosive ending makes the conclusion even more compelling.”

Judge Pizzo also ruled that Peru, which had filed a suit of its own in 2008 claiming the treasure because the coins were made from Peruvian gold and silver, did not have a valid claim because there was no nation of Peru in 1804.

Odyssey appealed the ruling. Now a federal circuit court judge has upheld Judge Pizzo’s decision, giving Odyssey Marine 10 days to return the loot to Spain. Odyssey will doubtless appeal to a higher court next, so this story isn’t over yet, but they’ll run out of courts soon enough.

Don’t worry about Odyssey, though. They just made a sweet deal with the British government and the Maritime Heritage Foundation to recover the wreck of the HMS Victory which an Odyssey team discovered in 2008. This is the predecessor of Admiral Nelson’s famed vessel; it went down in a storm in 1744 carrying four tons of gold.

The terms of the agreement ensure that all of Odyssey’s costs will be reimbursed and they will in addition receive a percentage of the market value of any recovered artifacts. If the Maritime Heritage Foundation chooses, they will get paid in artifacts rather than cash, but Odyssey prefers cash.

Odyssey will receive the equivalent of 80% of the fair value of artifacts which were primarily used in trade or commerce or were private property and bear no direct connection to the construction, navigation, defense or crew of the ship, such as coins or other cargo.

Odyssey will receive the equivalent of 50% of the fair value of all other objects typically associated with the construction, crewing and sailing of ships including, but not limited to, the ship’s hull, fittings, fasteners, construction elements, clothing, organic remains, foodstuffs, cooking utensils, pottery, weapons, ammunition, ground tackle and navigational equipment.

For any private property including coins or other cargo administered through the Receiver of Wreck, the Foundation has agreed that Odyssey shall receive 80% of the value.

So yeah, they’re doing okay.

Harmondsworth Great Barn was built in the village of Harmondsworth, Middlesex in 1426 to store grain harvested from the Winchester College manor lands. The barn is 192 feet long, 39 feet wide and 36 feet high making it the largest timber-framed building in England, and fully 98% of the oak timbers are original. The twelve interior bays are made from 13 massive oak posts resting on stone piers. Winchester College records from 1426 indicate that master carpenter William Kypping (or Kipping) got these mighty oaks in nearby Kingston upon Thames, and dendrochronological analysis (tree ring counting and pattern matching) confirms that those oaks that still hold the hipped tiled roof up today were felled in the early 15th century.

This particular barn design, a long nave with a high roof supported by rows of posts, requires a great many internal braces to ensure the wind doesn’t knock it down. Those exposed buttresses and the central nave with side aisles and bays give the structure a cathedral-like look, and in fact the construction techniques required to build this barn were also used in the building of cathedrals at that time. It’s likely that Master Kypping’s crew included experienced cathedral builders. No wonder, then, that Poet Laureate and passionate historical preservation advocate Sir John Betjeman dubbed Harmondsworth Great Barn the “Cathedral of Middlesex.”

The building used to be even bigger, but a north wing was demolished in 1774. It had a close encounter with a German bomb during World War II, but survived with just a few roof tiles askew. The barn was granted Grade I listed building status — the same grade as Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament — in 1950, and then designated a Scheduled Ancient Monument on top of that. It continued to be used for agricultural purposes until the 1970s when the encroaching sprawl of London made it the only Medieval barn in the area to survive its absorption into the west London suburbs.

In 1986, the barn was purchased by property developers the John Wiltshier Group who planned a full restoration. When the John Wiltshier Group went into receivership in 2006, the receiver offered the barn to the National Trust, English Heritage and Hillingdon Council for a token £1, but amazingly all three declined to purchase, probably intimidated by the daunting process of dealing with a Scheduled Ancient Monument (every change, even necessary repairs to a leaking roof, say, requires a literal act of Parliament) and the large sums of money they’ve had to spend every year to maintain such venerable carpentry.

Instead, in 2006 a shady anonymous offshore trust registered in Gibraltar and named Harmondsworth Barn Ltd. purchased the barn for £1 and proceeded to do nothing at all to it. They let it rot and closed it to the public except for one open weekend a year. English Heritage wrote them increasingly concerned letters about the condition of the barn, even going so far as to offer them grants to help fund necessary repairs. Harmondsworth Barn Ltd. didn’t respond. It seems their sole interest in the property was how a proposed expansion of Heathrow Airport would bring a new runway just yards away from the barn. If the Heathrow build had gone through and the barn had been damaged or demolished, then the owners would have been due compensation.

The airport expansion plans were abandoned. Obviously the “investors” didn’t exactly spend big money to buy the property and they certainly had no interest in spending the tens of thousands of pounds a year required just to keep a 15th century barn from falling apart. Finally last year English Heritage got the barn delisted as a Scheduled Ancient Monument smoothing the way for them to step in and save the day. Those dirty offshore rats actually had the testes to protest the delisting because they preferred to keep their £1 investment in a state of increasing decay.

English Heritage immediately spent £30,000 on emergency repairs, primarily to the roof which had holes in it from slipped and broken tiles. They also did some repair work to the weatherboard siding, most of which is also original, a very rare thing for barn siding.

Once the worst holes were plugged, EH took Harmondsworth Barn Ltd. to court to recover the public moneys they were forced to spend. Again the offshore corporation protested and rejected any attempts to settle out of court. Almost a year later, a settlement has been reached: English Heritage pays £20,000 to Harmondsworth Barn Ltd. and becomes the new owner.

Last week, English Heritage, which sees the purchase of the Great Barn as a welcome victory after a long series of drastic cuts in its budget, told the Independent that the building is “a supreme example of late-medieval craftsmanship – a masterpiece of carpentry containing one of the best and most intact interiors of its age and type in all of Europe”.

English Heritage will be handing over the running of Harmondsworth’s Great Barn to members of local campaign group The Friends of the Great Barn at Harmondsworth. It is expected to be open to the public from this April.

I can’t help but resent that those land speculator groinpulls managed to convert their single pound into 20,000 despite their shameless and deliberate neglect of the place. I bet English Heritage wishes they’d fished through their couch cushions for that pound back in 2006.

The Island of Montecristo, most famous for its role as the treasure island in Alexandre Dumas’ novel of betrayal and revenge (the best adventure story ever written, in my humble opinion), is a protected nature reserve in Arcipelago Toscano National Park, a chain of islands between the coast of Tuscany and the Island of Corsica. Giglio, the site of the ongoing Costa Concordia grounding disaster, is another island in the archipelago just east of Montecristo.

The islet is the tiny, rugged tip of an underwater volcano, and the only humans living there are one official caretaker and his family. Sights include an 18th century villa and the ruins of a 7th century A.D. monastery dedicated to Saint Mamilian of Palermo, a 5th century bishop who slew a dragon on the island and changed its name from Montegiove (“Jupiter’s Mountain”) to Montecristo (“Christ’s Mountain”). Very few tourists get to see them, however, since the island can only be reached by private yacht and only 1000 travel permits a year are issued.

Those few boats — and perhaps many others before them over the centuries — have carried an even more pernicious kind of tourist: the black rat. As they so often do, the rats have made a cozy home for themselves on Montecristo, breeding lustfully and invading every niche of the delicate islet ecosystem. There’s an estimated one rat per square meter.

Italian and European government agencies are planning to solve this problem by nuking it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. Okay, not exactly, but the scheme is almost as cockamamie as that. The National Park, the region of Tuscany, the Italian Ministry of Agriculture and the European Union announced that starting at the end of January, they will fly airplanes over Montecristo and drop 26 tons of pesticide pellets to kill all the black rats. They plan to use brodifacoum, an anti-coagulant poison often used as a rodenticide which is classified as “extremely toxic” for its devastating effect on mammals, birds and fish.

How do they plan to ensure none of the pellets miss the tiny tip of the volcano in the middle of an island chain national park, and having ensured this, how did they plan to ensure that only the invasive rats eat them instead of the native fauna? They have top men working on it right now. Top. Men.

Director [of the national park authority] Franca Zanichelli defends the project. “Nobody wants to poison the island,” she explains. “The project, prepared by experts, involves the use of 26 tons of food pellets, similar to that used to contain the rats everywhere, consisting of edible cereal feed which inside holds a fraction of a percent of the active poison. The baits, which can not be placed off the ground to the inaccessibility of the rugged interior, will be distributed by air with a special funnel provided by another protected area in Sardinia that has already performed a similar operation. Rat exterminations were performed with similar success in smaller Giannutri [, the southernmost islet in the Tuscan Archipelago].

Ecological groups, anti-vivisection organizations and former world champion dive fisher Carlo Gasparri (a native of Elba, home of Napoleon’s first exile and the largest island in the archipelago) vocally oppose the plan and have requested a halt to the project pending an official government investigation. Gasparri believes rats should be eradicated using a less toxic product that doesn’t persist in the environment for years, accumulating in animal tissues, tainting the food chain for God knows how long.

Fiorella Ceccacci Rubino, a representative from the ruling center-right People of Freedom party, has introduced a parliamentary inquiry on the merits of the plan, submitting that a less environmentally damaging method should be used.

P.S. – The top picture is from the phenomenal anime science fiction version of Dumas’ immortal novel, Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo. Although there are of course a number of major departures from the original, this is the only filmed version of the book I’ve ever seen that does the novel justice. If you love the book, like me, and if like me you’ve seen every live action movie version only to be disappointed, even renting the late 1990s French mini-series hoping that at least Dumas’ countrymen would respect the genius of his plot, pacing, and characterization only to stare in undisguised horror at Gerard Depardieu playing the starved and driven-to-madness Edmond Dantès in the Chateau d’If pretty much like he played Obelix, then Gankutsuou can make you whole again.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti is in Tripoli to sign a new treaty with the post-Gaddafi government, and he brought the head of a first century A.D. Roman sculpture with him to seal the deal.

The head belongs to a statue of Flavia Domitilla Minor, the daughter of the emperor Vespasian and sister of emperors Titus and Domitian. The statue was excavated from the UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site of Sabratha and was on display at Sabratha’s Roman museum in 1990 when thieves broke the head off of the body and absconded with it. (Some of the news stories are saying it was stolen in the 1960s, but I think that’s just one of the AP’s trademark typos getting passed around like a game of telephone.)

It turned up last year as lot #261 of the April 14 Antiques sale at Christie’s London. I will give you one guess as to the provenance they claimed on the piece. Oh yeah. It’s our old friend the Swiss private collection. They removed the lot from their website after they got busted, but this article quotes their original lot notes: “private collection, Switzerland, circa 1975; acquired by the present owner in Switzerland in 1988.” It was still attached to its body in a Libyan museum in 1988. Such a blatant lie.

London-based Libyan archaeologist Hafed Walda saw the lot before the auction and alerted Christie’s that it was the Domitilla head stolen from the Sabratha Museum. They ignored him and sold it to an Italian buyer for £91,250 ($142,000). Archaeologist and brilliant blogger Dorothy King also tried to get Christie’s attention but they blew her off too.

My experience of Christie’s is that that’s par for the course, but just in case … I knew they couldn’t give me the buyer’s details, so I asked the head of department, Ms Georgina Aitken, to pass mine on to the buyer as I had some information about the history of the piece. Ms Aitken said she would not do so unless I told her what the information was. I briefly explained that there was evidence to suggest that the head might have been looted and that the provenance was faked, and that Christie’s were aware of this and did nothing. There are more chances of pigs flying than of this information being passed on to the buyer.

Said buyer took his purchase home only to voluntarily relinquish it a few months later to the Carabinieri Art Squad. Christie’s had the audacity to respond thus:

A Christie’s spokesman said: “Additional information was brought to our attention after the auction. We subsequently cancelled the sale and are assisting all relevant bodies with the return of this object.”

See how weaselly that “additional information” bit is? Because Hafed Walda told them where that head really came from before the auction so they couldn’t say they had no idea they were selling stolen goods again. No, they just got additional info long after the fact, you see, that really clinched it for them. Please. Anyway they just reimbursed the buyer and that’s the end of that. No consequences. This is why they keep selling artifacts from “Swiss private collections” over and over again, even when there’s hard evidence that they were stolen.

To close on a less enraging note, here’s a fun fact about Flavia Domitilla Minor: she died at just 21 years old three years before her father Vespasian became emperor in 69 A.D. Twelve years after that, her younger brother Domitian became emperor. He deified her and granted her the title of Augusta.

Her daughter Flavia Domitilla converted to Judaism/Christianity (the Talmud claims the former, Eusebius the latter) and was exiled to the island of Pandataria by her uncle Domitian for her “atheism” which included a refusal to worship her own mother along with the rest of the imperial family and traditional Roman pantheon. She is now a Christian saint and her former property is the exquisite catacomb of Santa Domitilla.

On January 3rd, two vicious brutes broke into a retired vicar’s house in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, beat him up and tied him to a chair, then stole the most valuable pieces from his collection of paintings and antique furniture as selected by a knowledgeable accomplice via iPhone. Before leaving they destroyed the rest of the art and antiques with a hatchet.

Authorities are keeping mum on the details while the investigation is ongoing — the vicar’s name is not being released because he is terrified of drawing attention to himself — but we know that among the stolen pieces are paintings by 18th-century Venetian master Canaletto. The total value of the stolen works is well into the millions of dollars. No word on what the rest of the vicar’s collection was worth before they took a hatchet to it, but he’s been an avid collector and a fixture at auctions for decades.

A source said: “This robbery was well-planned and ruthlessly executed. They had possibly been watching the house for months, watching the major art sales where the victim was well known.[...]

The Irish Daily Mirror understands the two men worked with a third party to assist them with the robbery. A source said: “They were on the phone to someone outside the house and from what I understand they used a hi-tech phone to show the third party which pieces were in the house.

They wanted to know which were most valuable because those are the ones that were stolen. There was a lot taken, an awful lot.

“This was a horrendous experience for the victim and it was carefully planned and executed.”

The thieves also stole the victim’s contact books which had personal information about a number of other high end art collectors, including scions of the Guinness family and Edward Haughey, Baron Ballyedmond, the richest man in Northern Ireland. All the people in the book have been alerted to the theft and advised to increase their security.

Two similar thefts took place in the same county two years ago. The Police Service of Northern Ireland and Ireland’s national police force, An Garda Siochana, are investigating any connection between the crimes.