The History Blog

The European Union announced Wednesday that it will give Italy 105 million euros ($145 million) to safeguard Pompeii. The money is part of a larger one billion euro program to support major heritage sites in dire need of conservation and will fund a four-year project to preserve the ancient Roman town.

The news comes in the wake of yet another wall collapse last Friday caused by the heavy rains and mudslides that have devastated Italy over the past week. Last when year torrential rains caused an epidemic of wall collapses, Culture Minister Sandro Bondi narrowly dodged a no confidence vote and promised moneys and personnel devoted to regular maintenance to stem the tide of destruction. Those promises went unkept.

Bondi resigned in March and now there’s a new Culture Minister, Giancarlo Galan. He has stated that Pompeii is a priority for his ministry, but his response to last week’s wall collapse was to say that the damage wasn’t bad and to point to the EU’s coming €105 million as the windfall that will keep things from getting worse. Archaeologists and heritage organizations are concerned that the additional funds may get bogged down in legislative battles, corruption, pork barrel trades and diversions. Pompeii isn’t broke; the archaeological park makes 70 million tourist dollars a year, even in an economic downturn. The problem is in the pipeline.

“Money and people were promised, but despite frequent announcements, neither arrived,” said Maria Pia Guermandi, a council member at Italian heritage organisation Italia Nostra.

“The hiring of new archaeologists to help protect the site was included in a new bill recently but was then omitted from the final text. In the meantime, funds have actually been diverted to support museums in nearby Naples.”

Teresa Elena Cinquantaquattro, superintendent of the site, said she was awaiting the arrival of 25 archaeologists.

Guermandi said the partial collapse of the wall had been caused by water infiltrating the stonework. “All it would have taken to prevent this was some waterproofing on top of the wall – simple, regular maintenance,” she said.

“Instead of waiting for €100m, the government could have freed up €10m to get started immediately.”

At the conference announcing the pledge, EC Regional Affairs Commissioner Johannes Hahn made a point of saying that his office would “constantly monitor” the allocation of the funds. Galan said that now that the money has been allocated, “it’s a matter of spending it in the best way possible, to make a good impression on the EU and to accomplish something important.” This plan, he argues, “will allow Pompeii for the first time to count on a project of great scope.”

The day after that press conference a chunk fell off the House of Diomedes, prompting Italy’s main labor union UIL to urge an immediately archaeological assessment of the entire site so that we have a clear idea of what condition all of the ruins are in. The culture ministry said the Diomedes collapse was a gradual detachment of the wall due to vegetation growth. Opposition political party Italy of Values pointed out that that’s not exactly reassuring since it proves that there’s long-term structural damage in Pompeii the ministry knows nothing about.

Memphis — the one in Tennessee — has a 50-ton, 25-foot-tall homeless pharaoh on its hands. It’s a fiberglass replica of a colossal statue of Ramesses the Great found in pieces in Memphis — the one in Egypt — and is the only officially permitted replica of the original Colossus of Ramesses in the world. It stands outside the Pyramid Arena, a sports arena in downtown Memphis on the banks of the Mississippi which is no longer in use as a sports venue and will instead be the locus of a new Bass Pro Shops megastore (plus other retail outlets, office space, even a river museum). Neither Bass Pro Shops nor the Memphis City Council think Ramesses the Great should have a second career as a mall cop, so the city is looking for a new home for their giant.

The City Council ran multiple advertisements in local press outlets looking for any takers who would keep Ramesses on display for the benefit of the people of Memphis. Only the University of Memphis, whose men’s basketball team once played in the Pyramid Arena, responded. The university offered to pay a token dollar and move the statue to its campus. Some people on the City Council are not thrilled with the idea, though, because the university is state-owned rather than city-owned. Also, the campus is in East Memphis; the ideal location would be more centrally located.

There’s also the small matter of the original agreement with Egypt. The Memphis City Council brought in Glen Campbell, the former curator of the Wonders series that brought the ancient limestone Ramesses colossus to Tennessee, and former Memphis mayor Dick Hackett to testify to the stipulations of the deal.

Campbell said that he, Hackett and the rest of Memphis delegation first saw the original statue in the Egyptian city called Memphis in 1986. It was lying in a ditch in about three big pieces and about a thousand smaller pieces.

When Hackett proposed moving it to the Bluff City for what would become the first Wonders exhibit, he suggested that it be displayed in pieces, just as it was in Egypt. Campbell recalled the response from an Egyptian antiquities official: “Pharaohs do not recline outside of the sands of Egypt.”

So the Memphis delegation agreed to restore the statue with funds from the Coca-Cola corporation, display it in Memphis and send it back to Egypt when they were done. They also won agreement to create a fiberglass replica to keep in the city. But there were conditions. The Americans had to agree to destroy the mold used to make the statue and send the Egyptians a videotape of the destruction, Campbell said.

And there were stipulations that are relevant to the current discussion: They also had to agree to keep the statue on public display somewhere in the city of Memphis, not to sell it and not to give it away, Campbell said.

Shall we bet on who that pithy Egyptian antiquities official was? I won’t name names, but I’m guessing his initials are Zahi and Hawass.

The agreement was signed by Hosni Mubarak, so an argument could be made that it’s invalid now and Memphis can do whatever it wants with the replica, but thankfully they’re not taking it that way. Keeping the statue on display for its educational and aesthetic value to the city of Memphis is their priority.

Bass Pro Shops is scheduled to begin renovations and construction of Pyramid Arena this month. The statue will remain in place until the matter is resolved.

Two important works by Polish impressionist painter Julian Falat that were looted from the Polish National Museum in Warsaw by Nazis in 1944 and then disappeared for over six decades are on their way back to Poland. Representatives from U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Attorney’s Office officially returned the paintings to the President of Poland Bronislaw Komorowski in a ceremony at the Polish Consulate in New York City. At the same ceremony, President Komorowski presented the Presidential Medal to ICE Special Agent Lennis Barrois and retired Special Agent Bonnie Goldblatt in gratitude for their efforts in investigating the theft.

In August of 1944, German SS Obersturmbannführer and “Reichsbeauftragter für die Mode” (Reich Agent For Fashion) Benno von Arent took charge of the National Museum in Warsaw and looted the most valuable pieces, including “The Hunt in Nieśwież” and “Before the Hunt in Rytwiany,” two oil-on-panel winter scenes by Julian Falat (1853-1929), a top Polish impressionist painter known for his landscapes. These pieces are considered the finest examples of his hunt-themed work.

“Those paintings are two magnificent and very important pieces of art,” said Bogdan Zdrojewski, minister of culture and national heritage, Republic of Poland. “If you think about all the Falat paintings, these two are definitely the most interesting and most valuable ones.”

The paintings first came to light in New York City in 2006. Polish authorities found out in 2006 that these two masterpieces had been put up for sale at two different New York auction houses. They notified ICE and INTERPOL who conducted an investigation into their history. According to the ICE statement, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York filed a civil complaint in Manhattan federal court in December of 2010 asking that the paintings be forfeited on the grounds that they constituted stolen property illegally imported into the United States.

It’s unclear what happened between 2006 and 2010, nor do we know who put the paintings up for auction in 2006 or where they may have been before that. If any arrests have been made or criminal complaints filed, they haven’t been announced.

Despite the delay and many missing pieces of this puzzle, Poland’s Ministry of Culture is delighted to have the Falats back. Approximately 60,000 works of art that disappeared from Polish collections during World War II are still missing.

“The two World Wars that we experienced and numerous uprisings … left Poland’s national heritage really impoverished,” said Bogdan Zdrojewski, Poland’s culture minister. “That is why every object that returns to our country has huge value that is both spiritual and emotional.”

A 1906 verbal gypsy fortune teller machine in the gold rush ghost town of Virginia City, Montana, is being tussled over by private collectors, the state, historians and citizens. The fortune teller machine is one of no more than three remaining that used a recording to “speak” fortunes to whosoever fed it a nickel. Magician and collector of historic penny arcade games David Copperfield thinks it may be the only one of its kind remaining, and of course he wants to buy it. He’s not the only one.

Until recently the fortune teller machine lived in relative obscurity, one dusty game artifact among the multitude collected by General Mills heir Charles Bovey. It was Bovey who began to buy up properties in Virginia City in the 1940s so they could be restored and the town kept intact as living Montana history. He did the same for neighboring gold rush ghost town Nevada City. He dedicated thirty years of his life to preserving the state’s 19th century history, and while he was it, he used the buildings to store his ever-burgeoning collection of antique games and musical machines.

Founded in 1863 as a gold rush boomtown, just two years later Virginia City had a population of 10,000 and was made capital of the newly created Montana Territory. Population followed the gold, though, and that was already moving west towards Helena. In 1875 the capital was moved to Helena where it remained when Montana joined the Union as a state in 1889. In 1942, the last mine in the area closed. Bovey jumped on the opportunity and start buying.

That boom and bust cycle not only makes Virginia City a classic example of a gold rush town, but it also ensured there was little interest in knocking down old buildings to make new ones. Bovey was able to restore a great many structures from the first decade or so of Virginia City’s life. Of almost 300 structures in town, almost half were built before 1900. The largest proportion of the 200 historic buildings in town date to the 1870s, and even the later construction is of great historical value in that it illustrates the growth and decline of frontier mining-dependent communities.

Virginia City was designated National Historic Landmark on July 4, 1961. Charles Bovey continued buying and restoring until his death in 1978. After that, his wife Sue and son Ford continued to preservation and restoration efforts until Ford sold Virginia City and Nevada City, properties, land and contents, to the State of Montana for $6.5 million in 1998. Since then, Virginia City has been under the aegis of the Montana Heritage Preservation Commission.

Bovey’s historical games and machines stayed in town, adding to its tourist appeal. There are hundreds of thousands of these games, most of them in curatorial storage. The fortune telling machine was used by visitors through the early 1970s when its deteriorating condition necessitated its removal to storage. It was put back on display in 1999, but it was for looking only, no touching. Conservators finally began to restore it to function in September of 2004, finishing in June, 2006. In 2008, the gypsy returned to public display (again, no touching allowed) in the Gypsy Arcade, a turn-of-the-century gadgetry museum on Virginia City’s main street.

It was that successful restoration that brought the fortune teller to the attention of collectors. Around that time, Copperfield approached the Montana Heritage Commission offering a reported $2 million for the machine, including enough money to replace the gypsy with another non-verbal historical fortune telling machine for display purposes. They turned him down.

The pressure is back on now, though, because like most every other state-supported institution, the Heritage Commission has been kneecapped by budget cuts. You know it’s a bad sign when your curator of collections, Janna Norby, gets laid off due to budget cuts just two weeks after giving the AP a great quote for their article about the gypsy: “If we start selling our collection for money, what do we have?”

Thankfully she’s not alone in her sentiments. The current staff, skeleton though it may be, of the Heritage Commission insist that they would never sell of any of the antiques under their stewardship. This makes the private collectors grumpy because they think they can do a much better job of maintaining it and conserving it using the latest technology money can buy. Collector and restorer Theo Holstein is putting together a consortium of private collectors to bid $3 million for the gypsy. David Copperfield is revving back up to bid too, and those figures being bandied about could go even higher into the stratosphere.

Since the Montana Heritage Commission is overseen by the state Department of Commerce, which, needless to say, has slightly different priorities involving commerce rather than preservation, those millions of dollars just might be enough to pry the gypsy away from Virginia City after all. Don’t worry, though. If it disappears into a private collection never to be seen by the public again, Theo Holstein assures us that sale would be the equivalent of rescuing a precious gemstone from the dark bowels of a mine.

“They don’t have any idea what they have. It’s like they have the world’s best diamond and they just pulled it out of their mineshaft. It’s good that it’s there and it survived, but now it really needs to be part of the world.”

Part of the world = hidden forever in some rich guy’s creepy basement gameland.

In 1999, workers restoring a medieval communal fount called the Fountain of Abundance in the Tuscan town of Massa Marittima discovered a curious mural hidden behind a whitewash layer. It depicts a tree heavily laden with heavily laden phalluses under which eight or nine women stand in various poses and large black birds fly. Expert thinks the fresco dates to 1265, the same year inscribed on the fountain itself.

According to George Ferzoco, the director of the Centre for Tuscan Studies at the University of Leicester whose summer program was in Massa that year, the townspeople’s initial reaction to the find was mixed.

“They considered it to be somehow dirty or erotic, one or the other. Those who saw it as erotic looked at it as being a symbol that mirrored the reality of the water and the place. Water gives life; Phalluses give life: Isn’t this a unique and interesting way to portray the life-giving properties of water? The porn camp, if we can call it that, saw it as being somehow deliberately obscene and thus believed that as little attention as possible needed to be drawn to it.”

Over a decade later, that ambivalence has long gone and locals are furiously protective of their Tree of Fertility. In 2008 a program of restoration was undertaken to fully clean the mural which had suffered not just from its whitewashing but also from water damage and concretions. The restoration finally ended in early August and the public were allowed back in to view the mural, only to find to their dismaythat there were parts missing. Male parts.

The experts who carried out the restoration have been accused of sanitising the mural by scrubbing out or altering some of the testicles, which hang from the tree’s branches along with around 25 phalluses.

“Many parts of the work seem to have been arbitrarily repainted,” said Gabriele Galeotti, a town councillor who has called for an investigation after seeing the finished work. “The authenticity of the fresco seems to have been compromised by a restoration effort that did not respect the original character of the work.”

The restorers deny categorically having painted over any phalluses. They claim any paint loss was the result of salt and calcium concretions lifting paint as they were removed during the cleaning. If any repainting gets done, restorers say, it’ll be done to put the lost phalluses back in, not to remove them.

Councilman Galeotti is not at all satisfied with that explanation.

“What the restorers say is absolute nonsense. As far as we are concerned they have compromised the authenticity of the fresco. The work was intended as a symbol of fertility with the penises being crucial to the intention of the art but now these have been removed and the message is therefore no longer there.

“We intend to make a formal complaint to the local prosecutor so that he can open an investigation into this disrespectful slaughter of an artistic work. There was obviously no intention to respect the original artist.”

Unfortunately, I can’t find any before and after images of the tree so we can assess the phallic loss with our own eyes, but judging from some of the old pictures I found (see this one from 2003), the fresco was in truly awful condition when uncovered. Recent pictures show it in far superior condition, figures, phalluses and tree.

It’s probably not actually a fertility symbol, btw. George Ferzoco’s studies suggest that the fresco is a political allegory, negative advertising, if you will, writ large in a highly trafficked location: the public fountain where people drew their water for daily use. Ferzoco notes:

“The fact of the matter is that there is, with regard to the phalluses on display in this painting, nothing whatsoever to do with fertility. It’s one thing to have a symbol of a phallus on its own. That can stand for good luck, fertility, what have you. It’s another to put it in a different context, one in which it’s seen to be quite literally growing on a tree. The Medieval culture, more than ours, was one that was extremely sensitive to what was perceived as the goodness of nature, the goodness of what is natural, and they would have put two and two together in a way which involved seeing this particular tree bearing fruit that is not natural fruit. Those two elements of the equation would have added up to be something which is not natural and hence not good.”

While the phalluses in the tree are, by the context, strange and shocking, there are other phalluses in the painting which add currency to Ferzoco’s hypothesis that this is anything but a mural celebrating fecundity. “We have an image of two women who appear to be locked in serious combat over one of these phalluses, so this supposed fertility symbol that ought to bring life and goodness is in fact bringing strife to the people fighting over it. More importantly, there is a woman on the left side of the mural, standing in what I call her ‘Lady Di’ pose, standing quite demurely, until you realise that she’s being sodomised by one of these phalluses. You can’t get pregnant by sodomy – it’s the ultimate in non-fertility. There’s something going on in the mural that subverts notions of fertility.”

But why would one display such an extravagant, and no doubt expensive, symbol of non-fertility in such a central place? What message is it conveying? “The key to that subversion – according to Ferzoco – is shown with the symbol of one of the two competing political factions of the time, which is displayed prominently in the mural. This is the Eagle, a symbol of the Ghibelline party. The juxtaposition of this party symbol along with another symbol being used unnaturally, in a non-fertile way is meant to create in the viewer a kind of relationship between what is unnatural or not good on the one hand and the Ghibelline party on the other. It makes even more sense when you consider that during almost all of its history as an independent city republic, Massa Marittima was controlled by the anti-Ghibelline Guelph party.”

Stick with us, is the message, or prepare for a society in which perverted trees grow phallus fruit and women tear each other’s hair out trying to have non-reproductive sexual congress with them.

Zahi Hawass is like Napoleon only he escapes from Saint Helena not just Elba. Yet again, Hawass has managed to hold on to his job even after being fired a second time. (Okay technically he resigned the first time, but let’s just say that was a decision made under considerable political pressure.)

The prime minister announced earlier in the week that Zahi Hawass, the archaeologist known for his National Geographic documentaries and close ties to the Mubarak family, was to be replaced by Abdel Fattah el Banna as minister of antiquities. But Sharaf reversed himself and decided to temporarily keep Hawass in his post.

“Dr. El Banna has accused several of the antiquities employees of corruption and thus triggered much rejection against him holding the position. Essam Sharaf consequently believed that it wouldn’t be appropriate atmosphere for him to work,” the government announced in a statement.

Hawass told MENA on Wednesday that he was asked by Sharaf to carry on his duties but wasn’t mentioned in Thursday’s list of ministers. A Cabinet spokesman later announced that the ministry of antiquities would be downgraded to a Cabinet-affiliated office and not be its own ministry.

The new office will be the same as the old office before Mubarak made it a ministry during a reshuffle during the January turmoil that brought down his regime. So it’s the Supreme Council of Antiquities again now and it reports to the prime minister.

Hawass told the New York Times that he’s only hanging around for a few days until a suitable replacement can be found. He said he’s looking forward to retiring to write books and “living quietly as a private person, away from politics.” Yes I’m sure. Very likely.

It seems like it might even stick this time. Under pressure from continuing protests, Prime Minister Essam Sharaf announced Sunday that 12 ministers with ties to the Mubarak regime would be replaced, among them Minister for Antiquities Zahi Hawass.

For more than a decade, he has been the international face of Egypt’s archaeology, with his trademark “Indiana Jones” hat that turned him into an instantly recognizable global icon. Hawass, however, has been the target of a series of heavily publicized protests by archaeology graduates who accused him of corruption and seeking publicity for himself.

He has been accused of being too close to Mubarak and his family, along with former culture minister Farouq Hosni, himself a protege of the Mubaraks who had served in the Cabinet for 25 years until he was pushed out after the revolution.

Hawass confirmed the truth of this report to the New York Times, and there’s extraordinary footage of him getting mobbed by angry protesters as he attempted to leave the ministry on Sunday.

Archaeologists have long grumbled under their breaths about Hawass’ stranglehold on every aspect of Egyptian archaeology. Egyptian blogger 3arabaway explains the anti-Hawass case well in this post. I wasn’t aware of how Hawass’ indefatigable pursuit of foreign tourism translated into a repellent kind of mini-Jim Crow.

It is common practice for him to look down on Egyptians. During Egyptian public holidays, he bans Egyptians from visiting the pyramids and other historic sites, saying they harm Egypt’s antiquities. At the opening of the new Museum gift shop, when asked about the cafeteria and how it was too expensive for the average Egyptian, he said Egyptians can go eat at el-Gahsh (a popular foul place in a low-income neighborhood) – this cafe is for tourists only.

Ancient sites as Sun City. Charming.

Hawass’ replacement is still unknown at this time. The Prime Minister first appointed Abdel-Fattah el-Banna, a professor of restoration who has been an active participant in the Tahrir Square protests, but he was roundly criticized for lacking the archaeological credentials to be antiquities minister. Mohamed Abdel-Maksoud, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, made a beeline for the prime minister’s office to argue that it would be a grave error to appoint a non-archaeologist like Banna. Museum employees all over Egypt went on strike Monday to protest the appointment, so by the end of today Banna had handed in his resignation.

On July 3rd, the thousand-year-old Baphuon temple in Cambodia’s Angkor Thom complex will be officially reopened to the public after it was dismantled into its 300,000 component stones in 1960. It has taken a French and Cambodian restoration team 15 years to pick up where the 1960-1970 restoration was forced to leave off by the advancing Khmer Rouge forces and solve the greatest 3D puzzle in the world.

The three-tier pyramidical temple was built by King Udayadityavarman II in around 1060. Dedicated to Siva, it was the largest temple in the country until Angkor Wat was built in the next century, and it was famed for its dramatic central tower. With the tower, it was 164 feet (50 meters) high, and 426 by 340 feet (130 x 104 meters) wide. It was built around a sand core, however, and its massive size, hasty construction and thin walls led to structural problems almost from the beginning.

By the 15th century, large portions of it had collapsed, so when it was converted from a Hindu temple to a Buddhist one, builders had no qualms about removing large chunks of rock from the tower to create an abstract outline of a massive reclining Buddha (30 feet high and 230 feet long) on the second tier, endangering the structure even further.

Come the 20th century, the temple was in ruins. The Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient (EFEO), the French organization that was in charge of Angkor conservation since 1908, started an ambitious program of restoration in 1960. Based on successful use of anastylosis by Dutch restorers in Java, the restoration of the Baphuon temple called for the ruins to be completely dismantled, the structure shored up, then the temple rebuilt. Each of the 300,000 sandstone blocks were numbered and spread out over 10 hectares of the surrounding area. Careful records were kept so that they could all be put back together again. This was a dry stone construction — no mortar was used to glue stones together — so every stone was individually shaped to fit together.

Soon after the temple was dismantled, the Cambodian civil war broke out. They were working on the second tier when the EFEO restorers were expelled from the country and many of the Cambodian restorers and builders were killed. When the KR took Phnom Penh in 1975, the EFEO offices were ransacked and all the records lost.

In 1995, after the civil war of the 1980s and the political turmoil of the early 1990s settled down, the EFEO restorers were allowed back into the country under the leadership of Pascal Royere. Without the original plans, however, the undertaking was daunting to the point of impossibility.

“It has been said, probably rightly so, that it is the largest-ever 3D puzzle,” Royere told AFP.

The team carefully measured and weighed each block and then relied on archive photos stored in Paris, drawings and the recollections of Cambodian workers to figure out where each part fits.

“We were facing a three-dimensional puzzle, a 300,000-piece puzzle to which we had lost the picture. And that was the main difficulty of this project,” Royere said.

Thankfully the EFEO offices in Paris had photographs of the site stretching back to 1910, so the team was able to track certain blocks and figure out where they went based on where they had been. Sometimes they would find the block they were looking for in 10 minutes, sometimes in three weeks. Royere was also fortunate to have the spry mind of Jacques Dumarcay, the architect who had supervised the dismantling in the 1960s, on his side, and about 30 Cambodian workers who had worked on Angkor projects in the 60s and 70s and had survived the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge. One of them, Mith Priem, is now a team supervisor at Baphuon. He was able to recognize patterns on the stones based on his decades-old experience and train new workers to do the same.

They attempted computer modelling but it wasn’t as helpful as the experience and knowledge of the people who had been involved in the original project. Ultimately this immense 3D puzzle would be solved by dedicated people with good memories working hard for a decade and a half.

The rebuilding has taken a good seven years longer than the earliest overly optimistic projections, but partial access was allowed to visitors starting in May 2006. There’s a lovely photo gallery of the restored Baphuon temple here, and video accompanying the AFP story here.

The Canadian government returned 21,000 looted ancient artifacts to Bulgaria‘s culture minister in a formal ceremony at the Canadian Museum of Civilizations in Ottawa. The objects range over 2,600 years of Bulgarian history from many different cultures — Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, etc. — that have had a presence in the region. They include jewelry, coins, belt buckles, crosses, amulets, bronze eagles and everyday items like bone sewing needles, arrows and spearheads.

Bulgarian Minister of Culture Vejdi Rashidov received the artifacts from Canada’s Heritage Minister, James Moore. Moore noted that the ceremony marked “Canada’s largest-ever return of illegally imported cultural property.” Minister Rashidov described the event as “highly emotional” and awarded the Canadian Cultural Heritage Department with the Golden Century, the highest insignia of Bulgaria’s Ministry of Culture.

It’s been a long time in coming. The first two imports of illegally excavated Bulgarian cultural property were discovered in 2007 by the Canada Border Services Agency. They were mailed from Bulgaria to an unnamed dealer who authorities believed planned to sell the artifacts on the Internet. The Border Services agents referred the confiscated objects to the Canadian Cultural Heritage Department which in turn called in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for further investigation. The Mounties kept seizing Bulgarian shipments until by November 2008, they had confiscated 21,000 coins, jewels and assorted artifacts.

No charges were filed against the importer, and he only formally abandoned the items in January of this year, thus finally clearing the way for the Court of Quebec to rule under the Cultural Property Export and Import Act that the seized artifacts should be returned to the Republic of Bulgaria.

It’s great news that such a large trove of priceless Bulgarian cultural property is on its way home, but I’m disturbed by the lack of legal repercussions here. You know who is receiving these stolen goods. You have the goods themselves in custody for three to four years, but you can’t make an arrest and instead have to wait until he lets go before you return the artifacts? That’s not much of a deterrent.

Minister Rashidov says the Bulgarian government plans a repatriation ceremony on the receiving end. Most of the artifacts will then be placed in a variety of Bulgarian museums.

In a break from the usual pattern, an art dealer who has chosen to remain anonymous put his freedom and career on the line to rescue an ancient Buddha statue looted from the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul during the 1990s.

The rare 4-foot statue of Gandharan Buddha with flames coming off his shoulders and water flowing from his feet dates to the 2nd century A.D. It was stolen at some time during the civil wars after the fall of the Soviet-backed Najibullah regime in 1992 and had traveled the dark halls of the black market in antiquities until it was recently purchased by a Japanese private collector. A Japanese dealer sent our hero a picture of the statue and he immediately recognized it from his years of travel in Afghanistan. He even remembered exactly where it had been displayed in the National Museum.

He contacted the collector and told him that the piece had been stolen, begging him to return it to the museum. Appeals to giving a damn about the cultural heritage of a war-torn nation fell on deaf ears. The collector refused to give it up. Under Japanese law, owners cannot be prosecuted for purchasing a stolen artifact even if there’s concrete proof that the item was looted.

The UK, on the other hand, has laws against buying stolen goods, but faced with the prospect of this precious piece of Afghan heritage disappearing into a private collection forever, the British art dealer (heretofore known as BAD, like in BADASS) decided he had to take the risk of being arrested to save the Buddha and return it to Kabul where it belonged. He offered to buy the statue from the Japanese collector.

He told two people of his plan: Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum and St John Simpson, a curator. They sought legal counsel only to receive confirmation that there was nothing they could do to protect themselves. Getting mixed up in this deal was illegal and they could get in big trouble, despite their best intentions. They decided the public good was more important than holding to the letter of the law, so they supported BAD’s attempt to buy the statue. He spent a year negotiating with the collector, and finally he was able to secure the sale using only his own money.

There are no details in the article about how the artifact was imported, possibly because said import was technically smuggling, but whatever they did worked.

Simpson described the rescue as “terribly appropriate”, coming as it did on the 10th anniversary of the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan: “They’re gone forever. But one very important piece can be returned. This is a very important and stunningly beautiful piece.”

Omara Khan Massoudi, director of the National Museum of Afghanistan, described it as “one of our most treasured objects”. One source put the sculpture’s value at £600,000, but the British Museum said it is “without value, given its provenance”.

The Buddha is now safe in the hands of the British Museum where it will go on display Wednesday as part of its hugely successful Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World, which has been so popular the museum extended its run through July 17. The Gandharan Buddha will be returned to the National Museum in Kabul along with the rest of the exhibits.