Month: July 2013

Gravestones hidden from Nazis found in Vienna Jewish cemetery

Modern(ish), Renaissance

Restorers working on the oldest Jewish cemetery in Vienna have unearthed 20 headstones dating as far back as the 16th century that were carefully buried in 1943 to keep them from being destroyed. The gravestones were buried horizontally in several layers with soil in between. Radar analysis of the grounds indicates there are hundreds of headstones buried on the site. Raimund Fastenbauer of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG) (Vienna Israelite Community) believes there may be as many as 600, which, if they could be recovered and restored, would make this little cemetery in the courtyard of a city-run old people’s home a cultural and historical site of great significance, comparable with that of the vast Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague.

The Vienna cemetery was founded in 1540 as the main burial ground for Vienna’s Jews. It has no official name but is sometimes referred to today as Seegasse Jewish Cemetery because it’s on Seegasse, or Lake Lane. The cemetery was in use until 1783 when Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II ordered that all burials at cemeteries within city walls cease. New ones were built outside the city while the ones in town were closed and built over. In keeping with Jewish religious requirements, the little cemetery was left alone. No graves were removed, no bodies exhumed, no construction done on the site.

By 1938, Joseph II’s enlightened despotism and relative religious tolerance was but a faint memory. With the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria, came constant government-approved vandalism and destruction of Jewish property, including desecration of the old cemetery. Many of the 931 historic headstones were damaged or destroyed, but that wasn’t good enough for the Nazis. In 1943, the Nazi government decided to raze the entire cemetery and build over the grounds. The small number of Jews remaining in Vienna braved great danger to save what they could before the bulldozers leveled their ancestral graves.

Out of the 185,000 Jews living in Vienna before the Anschluss, 65,000 were sent to the death camps from which only 2,000 returned alive. The rest either fled or were killed, leaving 25,000 Jews in Vienna by 1946. Most of them emigrated. Nobody who knew of the fate of the Seegasse gravestones survived, or if they did, revealing the hidden locations was not foremost on their minds.

In the 1980s, some of the gravestones were recovered. They had been removed to Vienna’s Central Cemetery, an interdenominational cemetery built in 1874 with two large Jewish sections, and buried there. Two hundred and eighty of the Seegasse headstones were found during this excavation at Central Cemetery. They were returned to Lake Lane and placed in their original positions using a survey of the site made in the 1910s by Jewish historian and librarian Bernhard Wachstein as a reference. The cemetery was officially re-sanctified on September 2, 1984.

In 2004, the city of Vienna and the government of Austria began a major project of renovation of the Seegasse cemetery. Dozens of headstones have already been restored and work will continue through 2018. If Fastenbauer is right that the 600 or so headstones still missing are buried on the grounds, and if they can be excavated and put back in the original locations as per the Wachstein survey, Seegasse would be the only Jewish cemetery in the world to have been restored to a pre-World War II state.

Mazarin’s lost golden chest was being used as a bar

Renaissance, Treasures

In the first decades of the 17th century, Japan’s Tokugawa shogunate encouraged foreign trade. The shogun had the monopoly on trade with non-Japanese, and made giant gobs of money from it between 1603 and 1635. In 1635, the shogunate changed gears completely, introducing Seclusion laws that prohibited foreigners from entering Japan and Japanese from leaving. The only foreign ships allowed in Japanese territory under these new laws were Chinese, Korean, and Dutch, and their movements were highly restricted.

Around 1640, chief of the mission of the Dutch East India Company François Caron commissioned a group of gold lacquer boxes from the Kaomi Nagashige of Kyoto, a master craftsman who was the official lacquer-maker to the Tokugawa rulers. In 1639 he had created an exceptional bridal trousseau of 75 boxes for two-year-old Princess Chiyohime on the occasion of her engagement. The lacquer decoration featured scenes from The Tale of Genji, a romance written in the early 11th century by noblewoman and lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu which is often described as the first novel (you can download the whole book for free here). The baby princess’ trousseau is a Japanese national treasure today, part of the permanent collection of the Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya.

Caron’s commission was smaller in number — a dozen boxes, ten small, one larger but still petite box and one extra-large chest — but also featured scenes from The Tale of Genji. Because he was in Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu’s good graces, Caron was able to secure the finest quality of lacquer, the kind of thing that would normally be seen in the palaces of the Shogun. The chests were decorated with gold, silver and copper foil, sheets and powder and mother of pearl. The painstaking process of creating these marvels took at least two years.

In 1641, the Shogunate instituted another law, this one prohibiting the exportation of “art objects, including objects of lacquer, screens and other decorated with motifs of city, castle, human figures and above all, armed men.” The punishment for violators was beheading. The law was promulgated on August 14, 1641 and remained in force until 1864.

Caron was grandfathered in, however, and in 1643, the lacquer boxes left Japan for the Netherlands. The high cost of the boxes and instability from the Thirty Years’ War make them a hard sell. In 1658, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, reputedly the richest man in Europe, stepped into the breach. The French ambassador to the Netherlands’ main mission wasn’t diplomacy but rather to acquire Japanese lacquer for Mazarin’s collection. Mazarin bought the two larger chests in Amsterdam and transported them to France on a warship.

After Mazarin’s death in 1661, the chests passed by descent through the family until they were purchased in a French Revolutionary fire sale by a haberdasher who sold them to the wealthy British writer and art collector William Beckford. He willed the lacquer masterpieces to his daughter Euphemia, wife of the Duke of Hamilton. The chests remained at Hamilton Palace until they were sold in 1882 to raise funds to repair the palace. The smaller of the two chests was bought by the Victoria & Albert Museum. The larger one was bought by President of the Royal Horticultural Society and collector Sir Trevor Lawrence (history loop: his maternal grandfather was a haberdasher). He died in 1913 and when his estate was liquidated in 1916, the chest was bought by Welsh coal baron Sir Clifford Cory.

Sir Clifford died in 1941, and that’s where the trail ended. In the middle of the Battle of Britain, the estate was sold at auction with the lacquer trunk described solely as “a large Chinese chest.” the Mazarin link was forgotten as was its real country of origin. From that point on, the largest of Mazarin’s golden chests was considered lost. The V&A looked far and wide for it, anxious to bring the two rare beauties together again.

As freak occurrence would have it, the chest was actually a three minute walk from the museum in the home of a Polish doctor named Zaniewski. He bought it from the Cory auction for a pittance. In 1970, Dr. Zaniewski sold the chest for £100 to a tenant of his, a French engineer who worked for Shell Petroleum. The engineer used it as a TV stand in his South Kensington apartment for 16 years, then brought it with him when he retired to the Loire Valley in 1986. There he used it as a bar.

I guess he wasn’t a big reader of Country Life in 1980s or of the V&A website in the 2000s, because the museum used both outlets to get out the word about the missing masterpiece. The museum asked:

“How can a chest of such supreme quality and exceptional size have disappeared like this? Did it suffer at the hands of enemy action during World War II, or is it gathering dust somewhere in a proverbial attic, unrecognized for what it is by its current owner? The V&A is very keen to locate the Lawrence Chest or identify who bought it from the 1941 sale, as this would be of enormous benefit to our research on the Mazarin Chest.”

Oblivious to all this, in 2013 the engineer’s family called in the auction specialists of Rouillac to appraise and sell his estate. Philippe Rouillac found Mazarin’s lost golden chest in a house in Touraine propping up spirituous beverages.

At the June 9th auction held at the Château de Cheverny in the Loire Valley, the Mazarin Chest sold for 7.3 million euros ($9,544,000) including buyer’s premium. Two dedicated bidders drove the price up from the opening 200,000 euros, and for once, neither of them were anonymous private collectors. One was an American museum (I’m guessing the Getty, because it has the gigantic acquisition budget you’d need for this kind of caper and because in 2009 they had a whole exhibition dedicated to Japanese lacquer which starred the V&A Mazarin Chest); the other was the Rijksmuseum. The Rijksmuseum, fortified with funds from the Jaffé-Pierson Foundation, the BankGiro Lottery and the Rembrandt Association, won.

They are superstoked about it. No Dutch museum has a piece of Asian furniture art of this quality, and since it was commissioned by the Dutch East India Company and spent the first 18 years of its life in Amsterdam, the Mazarin Chest, the largest known lacquer artifact in the world, is coming home, as far as the Rijksmuseum is concerned.

Artifacts point to Viking trading center from sagas

Medieval

An archaeological excavation on the site of a highway expansion in the central Norwegian municipality of Steinkjer discovered two ship burials with grave goods that suggest the area may have been an important center of trade in the Viking era. Even though the artifacts are small clues, they are disproportionately important because they are direct evidence supporting the Norse sagas which describe Steinkjer as a major trading capital.

Steinkjer is ideally located for trade, at the head of the Beitstadfjorden fjord with the Atlantic on the west side, the Steinkjerelva river on the east and rich farmland all around. The village of Maere within the modern municipality was a religious center where people would assemble for seasonal celebrations and to perform ceremonial sacrifices to the Norse gods. Trondheim (Nidaros in Viking times), the capital of Norway from the 10th century to the 13th, is 75 miles to the south.

It’s a large area, however, and the coast line has changed a great deal since the saga heroes roamed the land. Add to that the difficulty of finding archaeological remains of organic trade goods and of deliberately impermanent structures, and archaeologists have had to rely on meager material like coins and other objects that were clearly imported to try to sort out where the trading center may have been. They plot the find sites of various traded artifacts on a map and then mark the areas with the highest concentration of goods as the likely trading spots. The distribution of amber and glass beads, Viking H swords and imported jewelry is heavily weighted towards Steinkjer.

What the two recently discovered ship burials added to the picture were two artifacts of particular relevance.

One, a silver button made of braided silver threads that appears to have originated in the British Isles, suggests that the person in the grave had a high status.

The second is a set of balance scales found in another boat grave. The balance scales were constructed in a way that led the archaeologists to believe it came from the west – not from Norway.

Scales themselves naturally suggest trade, and when the researchers looked at all the scales found in Nord-Trøndelag, they again found a clear concentration in the Steinkjer area.

So if Steinkjer was the center of trade described in the Norse sagas, where exactly was the tradepost? The working hypothesis right now is that it was under the current church. It’s the high point and sea levels were 15 or so feet higher on this coastline in 1000 A.D. than they are today, so it makes sense that the church site is where Norse traders did their trading. That’s going to stay a hypothesis for the time being since nobody’s going to be digging under that church anytime soon.

At some point in the Middle Ages, Steinkjer’s influence waned, probably because competing rulers moved their business elsewhere. Trondheim and other cities took over and Steinkjer became a sleepy fishing and agricultural area. It didn’t even get official town status until 1857.

In the clearing stands a boxer…

Ancient, Museums

He’s sitting, actually, and he’s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not in a clearing, but he definitely carries the reminders of a million gloves that laid him down or cut him til he cried out in his anger and his shame “I am leaving, I am leaving” but the fighter still remains … until July 15th. After that, he leaves New York and goes home to the National Museum of Rome.

Boxer at Rest is a Hellenistic bronze sculpture from the 4th century B.C. which was discovered during construction of the now-defunct National Dramatic Theater on the Quirinal Hill in 1885. Before the excavation began, Rodolfo Lanciani, Rome’s first post-Unification lead archaeologist, was warned by Giuseppe Gagliardi, an old antiquities digger who had made major finds excavating the city over the course of decades, to be very careful because even though he had never had the opportunity to dig down far enough, he was sure there were important bronzes buried deep under the site.

His instincts were dead on. On February 7th, a workman discovered the extended forearm of a bronze statue on its back. The statue was found 17 feet below an artificial platform on which the Temple of the Sun was built by the Emperor Aurelian to commemorate his victory over the kingdom of Palmyra and the capture of its formidable Queen Zenobia in the 3rd century A.D. This temple was enormous. Just to give you an idea, there were 44 columns in the peristyle, each of them seven feet eight inches in diameter and 65 feet high. Obviously the structure needed a massive undercarriage to support its weight, thus underneath the platform were concrete foundation walls 92 feet high and six feet thick.

The foundation walls followed the shape of the peristyle colonnade. They intersect each other at right angles in various places, creating large rooms 92 feet deep. These spaces were filled with rubble and earth, and 17 feet down into that fill was the bronze statue. It’s a heroic sculpture seven feet four inches high and was first thought to be an athlete, but historians now believe it represents a Hellenistic prince, possibly Attalus II of Pergamon or a Roman dignitary depicted as a Hellenistic prince, possibly Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus which would make sense because he conquered Macedonia and this statue’s posture is based on a famous portrait sculpture of Alexander the Great carved by Lysippos. It dates to the 2nd century B.C.

Lanciani wasn’t present when the statue was excavated, much to his chagrin. The discovery was made around sunset and the workers just kept going through the night without supervision. He got a second chance to see an ancient marvel rise from its context just over a month later. This one was found 18 feet under the platform and it was clear from how it was placed that it had been buried there in antiquity with meticulous care. The head appeared first, revealing the broken nose and cauliflower ears of a boxer. As the workers dug down, they found he was in a sitting position and that to ensure his stability, whoever buried the boxer had put a Doric capital under his butt so he could sit comfortably. The ancients who hid him down there dug a trench under the lower foundations so he could be safe from prying eyes and filled the trench with sifted earth to keep the bronze from being abraded by any rocks or grit.

Rodolfo Lanciani wrote about this exceptional discovery in his 1888 book Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries (a genuinely riveting book which any Romanophile or anyone with an interest in the rise of professional archaeology simply must read).

I have witnessed, in my long career in the active field of archaeology, many discoveries; I have experienced surprise after surprise; I have sometimes and most unexpectedly met with real masterpieces; but I have never felt such an extraordinary impression as the one created by the sight of this magnificent specimen of a semi-barbaric athlete, coming slowly out of the ground, as if awakening from a long repose after his gallant fights. His body is bent slightly forward; his elbows rest on his knees; his attitude is that of a boxer (pankratiastes) exhausted by the numerous blows received, the traces of which are visible all over his body. The face, of the type of Hercules, is turned towards the left; the mouth is half open; the lips seem to quiver, as if speaking to some one; in fact, there is no doubt that the statue belongs to a group. Every detail is absolutely realistic: the nose is swollen with the effects of the last blow received; the ears resemble a flat and shapeless piece of leather; the neck, the shoulders, the breast, are seamed with scars. The modelling of the muscles of the arms and of the back is simply wonderful. The gallant champion is panting from sheer fatigue, but he is ready to start up again at the first call. The details of the fur-lined boxing-gloves are also interesting, and one wonders how any human being, no matter how strong and powerful, could stand the blows from such weapons as these gloves, made of four or five thicknesses of leather and fortified with brass buckles.

The Boxer at Rest is a Greek original dating to around 330 B.C. Both statues were probably taken from Baths of Constantine, the last public baths built in Rome. Figures of athletes were decoration characteristic of Roman baths, and Constantine’s baths were right next door to the Temple of the Sun. People seeking to spare these statues from the fate of so many of their brethren — destruction during invasions, theft by Byzantine emperors (Constans II, the first emperor to visit the city in 200 years, looted Rome worse than the Ostrogoths when he spent 12 days there in 663 A.D.), being melted down for their metal value — went to an enormous amount of trouble to remove them from the baths and secrete them deep in the foundations of the temple.

This is the first time the boxer has ever been to the United States. You have until Monday to take advantage of this rare opportunity and hightail it to New York.

Drunk History is back and bigger than ever

Modern(ish), Multimedia

Drunk History, the former YouTube web series that graduated to a Funny or Die exclusive complete with appearances on the Funny or Die HBO sketch show, is coming back. This time it has its own series on Comedy Central the first episode of which debuts on Tuesday at 10:00 PM EST. Since the show now has a 30 minute time slot to fill all by itself, each episode will feature three sketches on different subjects centered around one theme.

Derek Waters, creator of the original series, is the host. Over the course of eight episodes, he travels to different cities to film his friends, often local comedians, imbibe spirits to the point of extreme intoxication and then expound on a historical event. That drunken narration becomes a voice over while famous actors perform the story, lip-syncing to every drunken slur and stumble. Waters describes the show in this excellent Splitsider interview:

I always say the tone is “ridiculousness taken seriously.” The way the show’s gonna work is that, each episode you’re gonna see people that are passionate about their city, and then you’ll be seeing narrators that are either from that city or know a lot about that city telling these detailed stories. We’ll be doing the reenactments just like the shorts, but it’s gonna have more of me interacting with locals from those cities. Three stories an episode.

Early reviews of the new series are positive. It seems Waters has managed to capture the absurd greatness of the modest web series while giving the sketches a connective thread so they work in a full episode and series of television. Sketches in the first episode describe events that happened in Washington, D.C.: Watergate, with Nathan Fielder as Bob Woodward, Fred Willard as Deep Throat, Jack McBrayer as H.R. Haldeman and Bob Odenkirk as President Nixon, John Wilkes Booth’s conflict with his brother leading to the assassination of Lincoln (Adam Scott as JWB, Will Forte as Edwin Booth, Stephen Merchant as Abraham Lincoln), and Elvis Presley’s famous meeting with Richard Nixon, source of so many online avatars, performed by Jack Black (who killed as Ben Franklin in the original series) as Elvis Presley and Odenkirk reprising his role as Richard Nixon.

You can catch a glimpse of that last sketch in this clip:

The entire episode can be previewed online on Comedy Central’s website. The only other clip online right now is a Winona Ryder playing Quaker martyr Mary Dyer, one of four Quakers who were hanged in Boston for the crime of not leaving the Massachusetts Bay Colony in keeping with statues banning Quakers from the Puritan colony.

I never could get enough of Drunk History. The meager flow of sketches couldn’t come close to quenching my thirst, and that last one with Ryan Gosling doing the ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas really doesn’t count because it’s Drunk Literature, not Drunk History. Getting to see three sketches in a row each week feels like the richest luxury. Mark your calendars for Tuesday night, or bookmark the Comedy Central page so you can watch the full episodes online after they air.