Manhattan’s District Attorney returned eleven antiquities, valued at nearly $1 million, to Greece after their recovery during multiple criminal investigations into finding and identifying stolen and trafficked Greek antiquities.
A repatriation ceremony took place on Tuesday, February 25 in New York, attended by Greece’s Minister of Culture, Lina Mendoni.
The returned artifacts include a 3rd-4th century BC marble funerary relief, the most valuable piece of the collection estimated at $500,000, a Roman-era ring depicting god Poseidon, a Hellenistic statuette of the mythical heroine Atalanta and a 10-centimeter Mycenaean votive figurine from 1300-1200 BC depicting a woman in a prayerful pose -the oldest item of the returned antiquities.
Marie Miller, an art historian at the University of Maryland, said that the marble relief, that was created in an Athens workshop, shows a banquet scene and is traced back to a museum in Tennessee. There are no details on how it was obtained or got there.
During the ceremony, Greek Culture Minister Lina Mendoni said that every repatriation is of distinctive significance because each is connected to Greece’s individual and collective identity.
“Greece under no circumstances asks that the museums that host and house ancient Greek pieces of art are emptied out. But it asks for the repatriation of all of its cultural treasures that have been illegally exported, as well as for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, which is a unique case. Their violent removal destroyed the unity of the monument, which is a symbol of Western civilization,” she added.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg announced on February 18 the return of another 107 stolen and trafficked ancient objects to Italy, valued at $1.2 million.
Both the Greek and Italian ancient artifacts were recovered by the District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU). They are connected to several known smugglers of antiquities, including Giacomo Medici, Giovanni Franco Becchina and Robert Hecht. Some of the recovered pieces were also connected to London-based art dealer Robin Symes, who was convicted of contempt of court for lying about antiquities he held in storage locations around the world. Symes passed away in 2023.
“The return of these pieces is the product of a substantial and ongoing investigation into several traffickers,” District Attorney Bragg said. “I am pleased that we have now seized more than 120 antiquities through this investigation, which continues to this day. I am grateful to our antiquities trafficking team and our partners in Greece for their outstanding collaboration.”
Since its creation in 2017, the ATU has recovered almost 6,000 antiquities valued at more than $460 million and has returned more than 5,400 of them to 29 countries.
During the repatriation ceremony, Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos, who headed the investigations, was honored by Mendoni with the Order of the Phoenix at the rank of Commander.
Return of stolen antiquities by Manhattan’s District Attorney follows the return of a griffin’s head by The Met
The Metropolitan Museum of Art returned an ancient bronze griffin’s head to Greece after determining that the 7th-century BC artifact was stolen from a Greek museum in the 1930s.
The restitution of the ancient artifact took place on Monday, February 24 at a ceremony in New York, where Greek Culture Minister Lina Mendoni officially received the bronze head of the mythological creature and its legal title from Met Director Max Hollein. The object will be loaned back to the Met for an exhibition at the museum in late 2026.
The cast-bronze piece was discovered in Olympia in the Peloponnese in 1914 and was acquired by the Joseph Brummer Gallery in 1936 from an Athens dealer. It was bequeathed to the Met in 1972 by Walter C. Baker, a financier, art collector and former Met trustee, who had in turn bought from the Brummer Gallery in New York in 1948. It had since been on permanent display, moving to the entrance of the museum’s Greek and Roman galleries in 1999. Met researchers had concluded the griffin’s head had been likely illegally removed from the Archaeological Museum of Olympia in the 1930s, though details of the removal aren’t known.
The Greek Ministry of Culture provided documentation detailing how the artifact was found in 1914 in the Kaledeos riverbed in Olympia by Themistoklis Karachalios, the local archaeological museum’s curator. It was stored in the museum’s library but was not properly recorded before it disappeared in the 1930s. Surviving documentation reviewed by both the Greek Culture Ministry and the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows it could not have left the museum’s premises legitimately.
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