Bowling Green and the Case of The Missing Turkish Mosaics
Does Bowling Green University have the missing pieces of an allegedly stolen Turkish mosaic?
Al Jazeera reports:
Ohio university grapples with case of missing mosaic
GAZIANTEP, Turkey — About 1,800 years ago, a rich resident of Zeugma, a Roman city in what is today southern Turkey, decided to install a mosaic in the dining room of his villa. Along with the Greek god of wine, the mosaic would feature a maenad, a follower of Dionysus known for ripping people limb from limb during drunken frenzies.
Tessera by tessera, artists constructed the ornate floor. They gave the maenad piercing brown eyes and seductive windblown hair. They surrounded her face with distinctive patterns of birds, flowers and geometric motifs.
About 50 years ago, looters crudely broke parts of this mosaic into slabs suitable for illicit shipping, and these pieces disappeared into the black market.
But the looters did not steal the section that included the maenad. She lay buried until 1998, when a team of archaeologists unearthed her. Today she hangs on a wall in a dark room in the Zeugma Mosaic Museum in Gaziantep, a city on the Turkish-Syrian border. The main halls are filled with extraordinarily gorgeous mosaics, though hers stands out for the abuse it has clearly suffered. With big gaps where sections once were, it looks like an old puzzle missing most of its pieces.
We know where those stolen pieces are. So does the Turkish government and the FBI. They’re in Ohio.
Comments
By all means, let’s ship it all back.
So the religious maniacs can turn it all into gravel.
Sounds like the Turks have just developed a fascination with preserving Roman cultural heritage, rather than Turkish.
But “cultural heritage” is a smokescreen; the Turks are in it for the money, just as they were when they sold chunks of the Parthenon to Lord Elgin. In that case, it worked out well for everybody, as in the subsequent centuries Elgin’s collection has been on display in London, far from the acidic air pollution of Athens which turns anything made of calcium carbonate to mush.