ICE and DOJ return Christopher Columbus letter to Spain
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-and-doj-return-christopher-columbus-letter-spain
ICE and DOJ return Christopher Columbus letter to Spain
WASHINGTON — Today, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) returned a more than 500-year-old copy of Christopher Columbus’ letter describing his discoveries in the Americas to Spain during an evening repatriation ceremony at the Residence of the Spanish Ambassador to the United States. The letter, originally written in 1493, was stolen from the National Library of Catalonia in Barcelona and sold for approximately $1 million.
“I am pleased to be able to return a priceless piece of cultural property to its rightful owners,” said HSI Acting Deputy Executive Associate Director Alysa D. Erichs. “I would like to thank Ambassador Morenés for his hospitality in hosting us tonight, HSI Wilmington, Madrid, Brasilia, and Paris for their excellent work on this investigation, as well as the tremendous assistance by our partners at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Delaware, without whom today’s repatriation would not be possible,” Erichs added.
The return of the letter was the culmination of a seven-year investigation jointly conducted by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware. It began in 2011 when HSI Wilmington (Del.) and the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office received a tip that several 15th century original manually printed copies of the Columbus Letter were stolen from European libraries and replaced with forgeries without the knowledge of library officials or local law enforcement. The investigation determined that the stolen Columbus Letter from Spain was sold in November 2005 for 600,000 Euros by two Italian book dealers.
“This evening ceremony is a showcase of the ties that bind the United States and Spain together,” said Ambassador of Spain to the United States Pedro Morenés. “The cooperation between Homeland Security Investigations and special units of the Guardia Civil has born great fruit in ensuring the return of stolen cultural property to Spain,” Ambassador Morenes added.
In June 2012, a subject matter expert, accompanied by an HSI Wilmington Special Agent, visited the National Library of Catalonia in Barcelona and reviewed the Columbus Letter in the possession of the library at which time it was determined, in coordination with Spanish authorities and with support from HSI Madrid that the letter at the library was a forgery.
In March 2013, it was discovered that the Columbus Letter believed to have been stolen from Barcelona was reportedly sold for 900,000 euros in June 2011. Following extensive negotiations with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, the individual in possession of the letter volunteered to transfer custody to HSI Special Agents, which was then brought to Wilmington, Delaware in February 2014 for further examination. In March 2014, a subject matter expert evaluated the letter and determined that the document was “beyond all doubt” the original stolen from the National Library of Catalonia. Additionally, other experts conducted a series of non-invasive digital imaging tests, which determined, among other things, the probable use of a chemical agent to bleach the ink of National Library of Catalonia’s stamp and that the paper fibers of the Catalonia Plannck II Columbus Letter had been disturbed from their original state where the stamps were previously located.
U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss stated, “The recovery of this Plannck II Columbus Letter on behalf of the Spanish government exemplifies not only the significance of federal agency partnerships in these complicated investigations but the close coordination that exists between American and foreign law enforcement agencies. We are truly honored to return this historically important document back to Spain – its rightful owner. I commend the dogged efforts of HSI special agents and Department of Justice attorneys who are dedicated to the recovery of stolen cultural artifacts from around the world.”
Today’s repatriation marks the second return of a Columbus letter by ICE, the most recent until now taking place in May 2016.
ICE has returned over 11,000 artifacts to over 30 countries since 2007, including paintings from France, Germany, Poland and Austria, 15th-18th century manuscripts from Italy and Peru, cultural artifacts from China, Cambodia, and two Baatar dinosaur fossils to Mongolia, ancient artifacts including a mummy’s hand to Egypt, royal seals valued at $1,500,000 to the Republic of Korea, and most recently, thousands of ancient artifacts to Iraq.
Learn more about ICE’s cultural property, art and antiquities investigations. Members of the public who have information about suspected stolen cultural property are urged to call the toll-free tip line at 1-866-DHS-2-ICE or to complete the online tip form.
Court upholds Italian art dealer’s conviction over rare church murals
Court upholds Italian art dealer’s conviction over rare church murals
Gianfranco Becchina, who is now 80 years old, was not present at Friday’s hearing in Athens, but his lawyer told the court that her client, being an expert in antiquities, was unaware of the murals’ importance and had no role in their theft. Judges rejected the appeal, upholding a conviction against Becchina on charges of receiving stolen goods.
The case dates to 1978, when a known thief from Pyrgos in the northwestern Peloponnese broke into the Church of Palaiopanaghias and chiseled off four 16th century paintings of the saints Ermolaos, Nikitas, Makarios of Egypt and Nestor, causing extensive damage to the interior of the listed monument. The man was sentenced to life in prison in 1984 over a string of unrelated thefts, but the four murals remained missing for years until they were discovered in 2001 during an investigation into a gallery in Basel, Switzerland, run by Becchina and his wife, Ursula Juraschek.
There, Swiss authorities discovered a trove of stolen Italian antiquities, as well as the four Greek paintings that are believed to belong to the so-called School of Thebes movement.
The paintings were repatriated to Greece in 2010 and are now on display the Byzantine Museum in Athens. Their total value has been estimated in the range of 160,000 euros.
German museum returns looted art to indigenous Alaskans
http://www.cachevalleydaily.com/news/world/article_e0904c26-2bd1-59f8-8d39-396bbbe5ce4e.html
German museum returns looted art to indigenous Alaskans
BERLIN (AP) — A Berlin museum has returned ancient wooden masks, an idol and other spiritually significant artifacts plundered from graves by an explorer to indigenous Alaskans, ending an odyssey in which many of the items were thought forever lost.
The masks, carved from spruce or hemlock, are daubed with red pigment — a traditional tincture made of seal oil, human blood, and powder from a stone that indicate they were used in burial ceremonies by tribes in the Chugach area of Alaska.
One mask comes to a sharp point at the top, symbolizing the deceased’s transition to the spirit world. Another shows a face with one eye open and the other closed.
Their exact age hasn’t been determined, but they’re thought to be up to 1,000 years old. They were taken from graves in caves on Chenega Island in Alaska’s Prince William Sound and a place known as Sanradna, whose exact location is no longer known, said John Johnson, a representative of the Chugach Alaska Corporation. The group today represents the region’s indigenous people.
“They’re a connection between the dead and the living, the future and the past,” he said Wednesday. “If you look, one eye open, one eye shut, it’s like traveling between two worlds.”
The nine artifacts were among some 200 Chugach items collected for Germany’s Royal Museum of Ethnology by Norwegian adventurer Johan Adrian Jacobsen between 1882 and 1884.
Several were thought lost at the end of World War II after being looted from the museum by Soviet Red Army troops, but they resurfaced in St. Petersburg, Russia. They were then given to a museum in Leipzig in communist East Germany in the 1970s.
Berlin’s Ethnological Museum only learned in the 1980s that they had survived and eventually secured their return.
Johnson learned of their existence from Jacobsen’s journals, where the explorer detailed how he had found them in caves and taken them. He traced them to the Ethnological Museum.
He led a delegation to Berlin in 2015 and has been working since then with the museum and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin’s museums, to establish their provenance and organize restitution.
Other items collected by Jacobsen were determined to have been fairly obtained through purchase or trade.
Elsewhere, Denmark has already returned human remains that were taken from the Chugach area. Johnson said much work remains to research the provenance of other artifacts scattered in museums around the U.S. and the world, including Britain, Russia, and Finland.
“Sometimes museums feel that this is the end, that it’s a sad day, but this is really a new beginning,” he said. “The more you work together, the more you understand and enjoy the significance of these artifacts.”
Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation President Hermann Parzinger carefully handed one of the masks to Johnson at a ceremony Wednesday, saying he hoped they could work together on future historical and cultural projects.
Work is underway on an exhibition on Jacobsen, who brought thousands of items to Germany from settlements on the northwest coast of Canada and Alaska. It will offer what Parzinger said will be a “critical examination of the history of the collection from today’s perspective.”
The self-proclaimed captain’s accounts are more adventure than anthropological, Parzinger said.
“Johan Adrian Jacobsen was no academic, he was a sailor,” he said.
Ideally, the artifacts returned Wednesday would go back into the caves from which they were taken, Johnson said, but since that’s impossible to do without risking their destruction, the hope is that they will be put on public display in a regional museum.
“They say a picture’s worth 1,000 words, but when you have the object it could be a million,” he said. “You learn so much when you see them up close.”
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