Emory University in the city of Atlanta, USA, reached an agreement with the Greek Ministry of Culture to return three artifacts held at the institution’s Michael C. Carlos Museum. One of the pieces is a marble statue of a goddess acquired by the museum from a New York art collector in 2002, but which was initially found during unauthorized excavations carried out in the 1990s and exported illegally. Another is an ancient bathtub, also acquired in 2002, that the museum believed had belonged to a collector since the 1960s, but which was actually brought to the USA illegally by antiquities dealer Gianfranco Becchina, who was convicted in Greece in 2017. The third artifact is a marble sculpture of a seated male figure, purchased from a dealer in 2003 and with no known provenance, but which was spotted in polaroid photographs of an illegal excavation in Greece in 1989. “It has been well documented that these objects were illegally exported from Greece,” said Lina Mendoni, Greece’s minister of culture, after signing the agreement at the American university, according to the ArtsATL website. “We hope that other museums abroad will follow the example of the Carlos Museum, which has sought to solve the problem through dialogue and a spirit of cooperation,” she added. The museum’s director, Henry Kim, highlighted that the institution is returning the looted artifacts as part of a cooperative agreement through which it will also receive pieces on loan from Greek museums for future exhibitions.
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