Zeynep Boz remembers the moment when, after years of effort, the return to Turkey of an antique statue depicting the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius materialized on a screen.
“The computer analyzed the data and we saw that everything matched. We were overflowing with enthusiasm,” explained the director of the department in charge of combating the trafficking of cultural goods at the Turkish Ministry of Culture.
The return last year of this bronze statue, clandestinely taken from the ancient city of Boubon (southern Turkey) in the 1960s to end up in a museum in Cleveland (United States), was widely celebrated by Turkish authorities who, in 2025, secured the repatriation of 180 items from the country’s looted heritage.
The fact that this statue – despite being headless – survived is exceptional: in antiquity, bronze, a precious material, was commonly melted down to make weapons, coins, or everyday objects. “That’s why bronze statues of this size preserved until today are rare,” Ms. Boz pointed out.
– AI Assistance –
For years, the Cleveland Museum of Art, which held the antiquity, was reluctant to return it, considering the evidence of its origin too thin, according to Ms. Boz.
But the situation changed after an expert in archaeometry concluded, supported by soil and lead samples, that there was “absolutely no doubt” that the statue came from Boubon, where an imperial sanctuary housed bronze sculptures of Roman emperors.
“It was a long struggle (…) and we won,” congratulated the Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, boasting of having “brought back the ‘Philosopher Emperor’ Marcus Aurelius to the land that belongs to him.”
In early March, a tool using artificial intelligence developed by Turkey facilitated the return of two 16th-century Iznik ceramic tiles identified on the website of a British auction house.
This tool called TraceART, operational since 2025, has identified several hundred objects belonging to Turkey, according to Ms. Boz.
– Stolen by a Frenchman –
Turkey, claiming to have returned works to several countries including Iran, China, and Egypt, also regained in January a marble head of Anatolian style held by the Denver Art Museum (United States).
This time, it was the museum itself that contacted Turkish authorities, explaining that the work “had been given by the wife of an American consul general who served in Istanbul in the 1940s,” said Burcu Özdemir of the department in charge of combating the trafficking of cultural goods to AFP.
Ankara seeks to recover other goods stolen during the Ottoman era, including a marble torso held in a museum in Berlin and dozens of Iznik tiles held by the French museum Louvre.
“Some consider that objects stolen in the 18th and 19th centuries were also acquired. We do not share this view,” summarizes Zeynep Boz.
The theft of these Iznik pottery was discovered in 2003 when a tile fell off the wall of an Ottoman-era library in Istanbul. On the back of this tile was the name of the French porcelain manufacturer Sèvres.
The original tiles, along with those adorning a panel near the mausoleum of the Ottoman Sultan Selim II in the former garden of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, were stolen by a Frenchman close to the sultan of the time at the end of the 19th century.
This Frenchman, claiming to want to restore them, replaced them with copies made by the Sèvres factory.
“These tiles are replicas,” a message in three languages near the mausoleum of Selim II states today.
The original panel is exhibited at Louvre-Lens, according to the French museum’s website, which claims to have acquired it in 1895. Contacted by AFP, the museum did not respond to multiple requests for information.
“We have provided evidence to France on several occasions and have discussed with the Louvre, but no agreement has been reached,” asserts Zeynep Boz, who, however, refuses to give up.
Published on March 20 at 08:15 am by AFP.
