#stolen city

[bogozbinted]

AMANDA'S CALLING!

the concern in her voice ☹️

[impiwimp]

[blueiscoool]

Who Looted an Ancient Roman Shrine? A Village Finally Tells

Investigators say they have figured out how bronze statues from a shrine built 2,000 years ago in Asia Minor to venerate the emperors of Rome ended up in museums around the world.

One towering ancient bronze was found last year in the Sutton Place apartment of a notable New York philanthropist. Another this year in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A third bronze, the head of a young Roman boy, was seized from Fordham University in March.

Each of these ancient artifacts, and a half dozen more like them, are believed to have once graced an elaborate shrine in a region that is now part of Turkey. Erected by locals to honor the Roman Empire at a time when it ruled that part of the world, the shrine in the ancient city of Bubon featured a pantheon of emperors, experts say.

So Lucius Verus, it’s thought, stood next to Marcus Aurelius, his adoptive brother with whom he ruled. The statue of Septimius Severus was beside those of his wife and children. The emperors Valerian and Commodus once stood on their own plinths nearby.

In 1994, a Turkish archaeologist, Jale Inan, published a book, “Latest Research on the Sebasteion of Bubon and Its Statues,” in which she plotted the location of the bronzes as they appeared in ancient times.

But just decades ago, according to investigators from the Turkish government and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, this set of rare, larger-than-life bronzes came to be scattered around the world. Individual statues ended up in a variety of affluent homes and prestigious museums.

Now, relying on newly discovered records and interviews with regretful, at times tearful, farmers now in their 70s, the investigators say they have been able to reconstruct what happened. They say men from a nearby village found the bronzes buried on a hillside, beginning in the late 1950s and, acting in tandem over a period of years, dug up the statues, often working in large groups to facilitate their excavation. Many were then sold to an antiquities dealer they knew as “American Bob.”

His real name, investigators say, was Robert Hecht and he would become famous — and later infamous — as one of the world’s great dealers of antiquities, both looted and unlooted. Although it had been illegal under Turkish law since 1906 to sell antiquities without official permission, Hecht and others brought the bronzes to market, the investigators say.

VALERIAN Roman emperor, A.D. 253 to 260 Headless torso is in the Burdur Archaeological Museum in Turkey. Head location is unknown.

Authorities now have begun to seize the bronzes, one by one. Two have already been returned to Turkey. Three more have been seized, and are yet to be sent back. Another four are being sought, according to the district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit.

Some experts, and at least one museum that holds a statue being sought, have questioned whether the evidence placing these particular artifacts in Bubon is as strong as the authorities have suggested. But Matthew Bogdanos, who leads the unit, said he is undeterred.

“Everybody fights Bubon,” he said of the naysayers. “But if there were ever a case we wanted to get into a courtroom, Bubon is it.”

The story of the Bubon bronzes, though, is more than just a tale of looters’ remorse, investigative zeal, art market intrigue and antiquities repatriation. It’s also a lesson in history, one that presents a more nuanced view of ancient Rome than that popularized by Hollywood epics. Those films often depicted an empire that relied almost exclusively on the spear, the whip and the executioner’s sword to keep the conquered in line. The truth was more complicated.

Some of the men who rose to lead Rome were, in fact, born in conquered lands. Severus was from modern-day Libya; the emperor Trajan from modern-day Spain. Rome allowed a measure of self-government and promoted the promise of citizenship as potent tools to keep the peace. And there was often local buy-in, evident in the shrines built by invaded peoples to show respect for their conquerors.

Known as shrines to the “imperial cult,” only a handful of them survive today in any form. One is the excavation at Bubon, according to archaeologists. From the time of Augustus, Roman emperors were venerated as gods, sometimes alongside the deities themselves. The shrine at Bubon, in what was then known as Asia Minor, is believed to have been built by local gentry as a sign of fealty to Rome. Started around A.D. 50, it is thought to have been in use for perhaps two centuries before it was buried in earthquakes.

The calamity, fortuitously, protected the bronze statuary at a time when discarded metal was routinely recycled into armaments. The Bubon bronzes, instead, remained underground, intact, for almost 2,000 years.

Until the farmers found them.

The stone plinths that made up the shrine bore the names of the Roman emperors, inscribed in Greek, with some of their imperial titles. This one once held a statue of the emperor Gordian.

Asia Minor Under the Empire

Though life under Roman rule would ultimately prove prosperous and pleasant for many of the people of Bubon, it took time and bloodshed.

Before the Roman conquest, parts of Asia Minor, also known as Anatolia, had embraced the Greek language and way of life and the region was largely under the dominion of Greek rulers for two centuries, starting with Alexander the Great in 330 B.C. But when Rome, after much warfare, ultimately took power in the first century B.C., the empire used its well-honed tactics to convert the region into a stable and passive province.

The Romans built paved roads and large public amenities like baths and markets. They integrated Roman tradesmen, soldiers and administrators into local life, and dangled the possibility of Roman citizenship, which conferred political rights on people from conquered lands.

“For much of Anatolia, the Roman Imperial period was the high point of classical antiquity,” said Peter Talloen, an archaeology professor from the University of Leuven in Belgium who is excavating in the region. “The vast road network built and maintained by Rome,” he added, “would result in Anatolian goods such as textile, pottery, wine and olive oil being profitably exported to all different areas of the Roman Empire.”

The Roman Empire, A.D. 200

In the period when the shrine at Bubon was active, the Roman Empire had spread through large parts of the world, as far west as modern day Britain and as far south as what is now Algeria, Libya and Egypt.

The Roman Empire, A.D. 200

In the period when the shrine at Bubon was active, the Roman Empire had spread through large parts of the world, as far west as modern day Britain and as far south as what is now Algeria, Libya and Egypt.

Bubon itself was a small and relatively wealthy agrarian hilltop community that, under Rome, featured central markets, a theater, low battlements and a small stadium for athletic contests. Its residents, perhaps a few thousand people, archaeologists estimate, would likely have enjoyed self-governance so long as they showed loyalty and paid tribute to the Roman prefect in charge of their province.

Amid the ruins of the theater, there is an inscription relating how the emperor Commodus (A.D. 177-192) commended the city for crushing a band of brigands. Bubon, as a result, the inscription reports, was rewarded with an extra vote at the provincial assembly.

Many monuments would have been erected, Talloen said, some to the local elites who financed the public buildings and activities like religious festivals, others to the Roman officials who authorized the local leaders to tax things like the ownership of land or the sale of produce.

The shrine, or sebasteion (suh-BASS-tay-ohn), at Bubon was one such monument, built to proclaim the populace’s devotion to Rome. Sakir Demirok, an archaeologist with the Burdur Museum in Turkey, said the shrine, a U-shaped courtyard that was probably covered, would have likely been a site for animal sacrifices, incense burning, and communal prayers and vows, led by a local priest.

Romans were keenly religious and worshiped multiple mythological deities, like Jupiter or Juno, whose favor or disfavor were thought to influence daily life.

“Rome was the safeguard of the peace and welfare,” Demirok said. “It was a system that provisioned grain for the citizens’ good and secured the trade routes. Cities were expected to demonstrate their gratitude for the stability provided by that system.”

“MARCUS AURELIUS” Roman emperor, A.D. 161 to 180 Headless torso at the Cleveland Museum of Art, under seizure order. Head location is unknown.

The Bubon shrine was begun, experts think, during the reign of Nero, between A.D. 54 and 68, and initially featured statues of the emperor and his wife Poppaea Sabina. Nero was popular in the Greek-speaking provinces because he embraced Greek culture and song. During its life span, at least 14 individuals were represented by statues — 11 emperors and three empresses — Demirok said, the last being Gallienus, who ruled from A.D. 260 to 268. As rulers were unseated, their statues were sometimes replaced, so Nero’s, for example, was removed and his name erased from the statue’s plinth, which later was used for Marcus Aurelius, experts said.

Experts credit the survival of the bronzes to a series of earthquakes that occurred in the decades after Gallienus was enshrined, burying the sebasteion in protective layers of soil and stone as the Roman Empire began its long decline.

The restitution of the statues now, as a group, serves to highlight, experts said, the central role they played in binding the people of a remote province like Bubon, spiritually and politically, to their counterparts in far-off Rome.

“They want to show their allegiance to Rome,” said Christina Kokkinia, an expert at the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Greece who has visited and written about Bubon. “They were proud to be Roman.”

Archaeologists and excavation site workers recreate the position of ancient bronzes of Roman emperors that once filled a shrine at Bubon in what is now modern Turkey.

Some Finds in the Fields

The looting of Bubon indeed took a village, investigators say.

The farmers from Ibecik, a small community a mile and a half from the shrine site, told interviewers that they had known about the ancient ruins for years before they began digging up the bronzes sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s. As young men, they said, their teachers had led them up to a deep hole in the stony hillside that some came to call the “Museum.” One villager recalled some of the bronzes were piled up there, like logs in a fireplace, investigators said.

At first, just a few villagers were involved in selling off artifacts to local smugglers. But soon the local farmers joined in groups of 20 to 30 — sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing — to excavate and carry away the heavy, large bronzes, now filled with several centuries of settled dirt. Some statues were broken into pieces to make them easier to transport, the farmers recalled. Investigators say pickax marks are still visible on the bronze of Lucius Verus.

When the money came in, many of the families shared in the proceeds.

“It was seen as the property of the village,” said Zeynep Boz, a Turkish official responsible for the return of her country’s antiquities.

The illegal excavations ebbed after 1967 when the Turkish police found a headless bronze torso hidden in the local woods. That statue of Valerian, who ruled from A.D. 253 until his capture in battle with the Persians in A.D. 260, now stands in a museum in the nearby town of Burdur.

CARACALLA Roman emperor, A.D. 198 to 217 Head seized from the Met and in storage in New York. Torso is thought to be with a Greek collector.

But other bronzes, investigators say, had already entered the art market. Villagers recently recalled for investigators how a pair of local smugglers ferried the artifacts in a pickup truck to the port town of Izmir, about four hours away. There, in the souk, or bazaar, some were sold to a dealer they called American Bob. Investigators say that, based on the evidence they have collected, the dealer was Hecht.

The evidence includes shipping and sales invoices that show Hecht in possession of remarkable 2,000-year-old Roman bronzes that had never been seen before. In the late 1960s, he sold five — four torsos and a head — to a Boston collector called Charles Lipson, who exhibited them at several museums before consigning them to a New York gallery, from which they were resold. Investigators say Hecht sold other bronzes to a second gallery in New York.

At the time, the paper trail did not identify where the bronzes had come from and some of the statues had yet to carry the names of emperors. The bronze that was later identified as a depiction of Marcus Aurelius was just referred to as a large-scale Roman bronze in a 1974 museum exhibition, and there was a debate about where it and others had originated.

But a Turkish archaeologist, Jale Inan, came to be convinced they had all come from Bubon, which she visited in 1973, drawn by reports of the looting. In 1979, she traveled to Denmark, where a museum owned a bronze head that had been purchased from Hecht. She and a curator at the Danish museum agreed that it was likely a match for a headless torso in the United States that Lipson had owned and identified as that of Septimius Severus.

A line drawing featuring multiple boxes that depict the bases of statues that once stood in an ancient shrine. In her book, Jale Inan, the archaeologist, included schematic drawings of the site that depicted the scale of the shrine and were helpful in plotting the location of the bronzes.

In 1990, Inan returned to the hillside in Bubon to dig at the site. She spoke to local farmers who acknowledged they had taken part in illicit digging. She found a journal in which one of the looters had reconstructed what had occurred 30 years earlier. Through interviews and excavation, she plotted the positions of the statues using the stone bases that remained, the names of the emperors still inscribed on them in Greek.

In a paper and in a 1994 book, she cataloged her research, including sketches that showed how she thought some of the statues, now held by various parties around the world, would have fit onto the plinths at Bubon. She died in 2001, before she could realize the fruition of her efforts, but investigators today have built their work atop the research she started decades ago. “It was her life’s work,” said Elizabeth Marlowe, a professor at Colgate University in New York who has closely tracked the Bubon statues. “She began drawing attention to this problem shortly after the looting occurred and never gave up. She’s the one who connected the dots. This is all her work.”

A man walks on a road toward a rural town. In Ibecik, investigators are working with people from the village to reconstruct what happened decades ago when the bronzes were dug up.

The Farmers Came Forward

One summer afternoon in 2021, Zeynep Boz, the Turkish official, sat outside the village cafe in Ibecik’s main square and addressed some 90 farmers gathered at tables under the trees.

She described how, once Turkey adopted its antiquity law in 1906, there was no such thing as private ownership of buried antiquities. She assured the villagers they would not be prosecuted for events 60 years earlier and asked them for any old letters, photos or other evidence that could help get the statues back.

“Your village has been robbed to its bones,” she said. “It harms the country’s reputation. Please help me here.” “In the beginning they were like, ‘We don’t want to. The people have all died,’” Boz said in an interview. “But then slowly, slowly they understood our only purpose was making things good and they started talking to us.”

Boz and officials from the museum at Burdur eventually found 10 men who recalled the looting. Their testimony is crucial to Turkey’s repatriation claim, one now supported by New York investigators and other experts.

But not all experts agree that each of the statues was looted from Bubon. Some argue that Bubon was too much of a backwater to have housed such monumental bronzes or that the evidence is inconclusive.

Kokkinia of the National Hellenic Research Foundation said that, while she appreciates Inan’s research, she questions whether her archaeological techniques were sufficiently rigorous to have decided the question. She suggests further investigation at the site before every statue is shipped to Turkey.

“I love Bubon,” she said. “Let it have all the statues in the world. But it’s not necessarily scientifically correct in all cases.”

The Danish museum that for years said its bronze head belonged to the headless torso of Septimius Severus from Bubon has more recently said this is not certain. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen said more research was required.

“SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS” Roman emperor, A.D. 193 to 211 Headless body seized from the Met museum. Returned to Turkey. Some experts say the head is at a Copenhagen museum, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where the headless “Severus” statue had been on loan, turned it over to the New York investigators for repatriation. But the museum said it was not established that it definitely depicted the emperor or had come from Bubon. While it had the bronze on display, the Met referred to it as simply “Statue of a Nude Male Figure.”

The Cleveland Museum of Art, which holds a headless statue that investigators say is the Marcus Aurelius that once stood in Bubon, has gone to court to block its seizure. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which served seizure papers on the museum in August, said it has interviews and detailed forensic evidence that support Turkey’s claim. The museum has described the evidence as “conjecture,” though until recently it had said the bronze “likely represents Marcus Aurelius.” In recent months, curators have retitled the statue “Draped Male Figure.”

Some worry additionally that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government may be aggressively exploiting the return of cultural property for political purposes, boosting a nostalgic Turkish nationalism and a reassertion of its historical greatness at a time when there are questions about its commitment to human rights and democracy. “Why is the U.S. rewarding Erdogan, a demagogue acting daily against U.S. interests in the region, for this bad action?” wrote Kate Fitz Gibbon of the Committee for Cultural Policy, in 2020.

But the New York investigators say they have recovered additional evidence that illustrates the scope of the looting at the shrine, including the Hecht invoices, the testimony of the villagers from Ibecik and arms and legs from bronze statues that may also be tied to the shrine. (Hecht, who died in 2012, was accused several times of antiquities trafficking but was never convicted.)

Several of the villagers have correctly identified the statues now being targeted as looted from a lineup of other ancient bronzes. Some have mimicked the poses of the bronzes for investigators to show they remembered what they looked like, investigators said.

“There is this unbelievable heartening thing happening where people are coming forward in their 70s and saying, I have been living with this for 55 years,” Bogdanos of the district attorney’s office said.

Earlier this year, when the statues of Septimius Severus and Lucius Verus were returned, two of the looters, now in their 70s, were invited to see them.

“They were very emotional,” Boz said. “They really regret it. You can see it in their eyes.”

By Graham Bowley and Tom Mashberg.

[modmad]

had to share this little exchange which will make me smile eternally

[somethingintheforest]

My favourite genre of fanfic are ones set in London written by someone who has obviously never ever set foot in London. They write a utopia where the main characters all have cars which they park right outside their central London houses. They simply hop in and drive to their destination and are there in no time. Gridlock whomst? She does not exist in these wonderful worlds.

[tired-fandom-ndn]

Kim Kitsuragi really is king of minding his own fucking business huh. Harry will be like "I think this is illegal" and Kim's response is just "who cares" like yeah babe you're right, who fucking cares. I love him.

[causenessus]

been thinking about timeskip suna for the past four hours as i suffer through getting my hair dyed

[lotusishere]

Me seeing people have the title “short king” for Dex is so funny because I always saw him as a long noodle or a lanky cat. Fitz was always a short king to me. A angry short king with confidence. Only for people to see it reversed here

</3

[cephalog0d]

Yeah I'm not done yet.

The thing I keep coming back to is that as much as I'm down to nit-pick things like how characters are written and plot details (and boy are there a whole infestation of nits to pick), what it boils down to is that the basic premise here shouldn't even be happening.

I get they're doing a Thing with Bruce and the after effects of Failsafe and Zur and Insomnia so sure I guess it makes sense to have him acting totally unreasonably. I'm not saying it's a plotline I'm thrilled with, but whatever. This is about everyone else.

You have half a dozen people routinely patrolling in Gotham, who've been doing it for years, who know the city and how it works, who have at least two people who are particularly inclined towards collecting and parsing data for patterns for crime fighting purposes, and none of you noticed anything amiss until Selina called and was like "Hey did you notice my neat new plan I've been doing?"

To that point, in a room full of literal canonical geniuses not a single person has thought to ask any of a dozen very practical questions that occurred to me, a non-genius reader, roughly 10 seconds after reading what The Plan was. Things like, oh, I don't know

How is this going to be a sustainable long-term effort?

For example, what happens when Gotham's wealthiest realize what you're doing and dramatically beef up their security (with tech or with actual people), making it much harder and more dangerous?

Like iirc you, Selina, have definitely had some real dicey situations as a result of your profession, and you're a lot more experienced than these people.

(Hey speaking of which isn't there a whole secret society of Gotham's wealthiest and most powerful who have access to nearly unkillable assassins? Who keeps coming back even though they keep being taken down? You think any of these people might belong to that?)

What happens when the rich folks get pissed and sic the heavily militarized GCPD on you? Don't act like they won't, I'm sure someone's squirreled away stuff from that whole Fear State fiasco.

For that matter, what happens when the costumed villainry figure out who swiped all their henchpeople and decide to object to it, presumably violently?

How many people are we talking here anyway that you're training? How many ultra-wealthy people live in Gotham? How many easily stealable things do they have sitting around to take? (As opposed to, like, other non-liquid fake assets like stocks)

How are you fencing all this anyway? Isn't that a great way to get caught? Or is everyone just stealing cash? (Or did nobody think about the part between "got the valuable thing" and "have usable money from it"?)

How on god's green earth did you ever assume this was going to end in anything other than violence?

Like of course one of your guys got killed. It doesn't matter that you told them no violence, even if they fully buy into that it only takes one panicked reaction when someone's home who shouldn't be, on either side, and there you go.

Look I get what they're trying to do. It's supposed to be a big moral quandary about whether it's right to allow some crime if it decreases other crime, the struggle between Batman being unreasonably violent and unwilling to listen and this new plan of Selina's. First of all that's a weird debate to have when everyone having it is technically a criminal to some degree. And second of all, it doesn't matter, this isn't about the morality, this is about how this plan is fucking dumb and was destined to fall apart even if Batman was still asleep and the fact that any of you are buying it just means there's a gas leak in Gotham somewhere.

[becca-reads]

y'all okay if I just..... *hyperfixates publicly*

[gothamssexiestrogue]

So… the British Museum has an exhibit visiting Gotham. In this exhibit are a bunch of stolen artifacts from Bhutran. If those artifacts go missing and suddenly appear back where they belong… nobody saw anything, mmkay?

[bogozbinted]

literally on my knees drooling omfg

[pepperedflakes]

[dnptheinfinity]

golden pig dan sims edition except i don't have ears or the snout so he just gets the bucket hat

[anormalkidingotham]

am i dreaming or did the batmobile just crash into a corner store at full speed and then just keep going?

[sketchupnfries]

Felt like doing some drawings of my Starfield spacefarer, Ned since I recently started playing Starfield the other and am having a fun time. I think this is the third videogame RPG I've used Ned, with his hair going from dirty blonde (with a goatee), to green and blue hair, to now fire orange and red.