Turkey Battles the Met over Restitution Claims
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, like most institutions of its size in the US and Europe, has seen its fair share of lawsuits and controversies surrounding its collection. It returned nearly two dozen antiquities to Italy in 2006, as well as work acquired via Nazi looting.
But now the Met is facing a very different kind of restitution battle. The Turkish government is insisting it is the rightful owner of 18 objects from the collection of Norbert Schimmel, a Met trustee and one of the last century’s most astute collectors of Mediterranean antiquities.
Unlike the Italian claim, and unlike in the cases of Holocaust victims’ families, the proof here is scant to nonexistent. What’s more, both the US and Turkey are signatories to a Unesco convention stating that if a cultural object left the country in which it was produced before the year 1970, then it’s free to circulate. That cutoff date puts almost all the Met’s antiquities in the clear.
But Turkey doesn’t care, it now seems: it’s citing its own law, more than a century old, to insist that the artifacts belong to it.