Turkey has been accused of cultural chauvinism and attempting to blackmail some of the world’s most important museums in the wake of its demands for the return of thousands of archeological treasures.
According to cultural bosses in Berlin, Paris and New York, Turkey has threatened to bar foreign archeologists from excavation sites in the country by not renewing their digging permits if governments refuse to return artifacts that Ankara says were unlawfully removed from Turkish soil. It has also threatened to halt the lending of its treasures to foreign museums, they say.
The government in Ankara, emboldened by the country’s growing diplomatic and economic clout, has repeatedly said that the retrieval of the artifacts is part of a policy it intends to pursue for years, if necessary, calling it a “cultural war.” However, it denies withholding permits as a form of leverage.
The German Archeological Institute, founded in 1829 and responsible for some of Turkey’s most important excavation sites, says it has already felt the wrath of the Turkish authorities, after they threatened to withdraw excavation permits unless a huge 3,300-year-old Hittite sphinx was returned. When the sphinx arrived in Turkey to much fanfare last year, permits for reconditioning and restoration work were renewed, but those for digging remained outstanding.
Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin, which among other collections oversees the city’s Pergamon Museum, has accused Turkey of “playing a nasty game of politics” and of “threatening the future” of scientific work and other collaborations.
“The Turks are engaging in a rather aggressive style of politics,” he said. “They are trying to blackmail us and others by pushing foreign archeologists out. Their new tactic is to accuse us of not investing enough in the infrastructure of the digs.”
Since the return of the sphinx — which Parzinger insists Germany did as a gesture of goodwill despite being under no legal obligation to do so — Turkey has demanded that three further objects be handed over by the Pergamon. They are the more than 2,000-year-old marble torso from the old fisherman statue found in Hadrianic baths of Aphrodisias, a medieval gravestone and parts of a 13th-century mihrab (prayer niche) from Konya.
“All the artifacts were acquired legally more than a century ago and we are under no legal obligation to return them,” Parzinger said.
Turkey is also in dispute with the Louvre in Paris, which has refused requests to return objects. Ankara retaliated two years ago with a ban on French archeologists digging in Turkey.
Turkish officials are also at loggerheads with the Norbert Schimmel collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York over 18 objects they claim were illegally excavated, and with the British Museum in London over the Samsat Stele, a basalt slab from the 1st century BC.
Ankara says it only wants back what rightfully belongs to Turkey.
Turkish Minister of Culture and Tourism Ertugrul Gunay said 4,067 artifacts were returned from 2002 to last year. He said Ankara’s demands coincided with a new-found pride in the country’s cultural heritage.
“Our museum inventory is now on a par with that of European museums,” Gunay said recently. “The times when we simply exhibited artifacts in cupboards is over. We have caught up — what we have taken back is only a very small part of what we will take back.”
He added that over the past five years, Turkey had “spent more on history” than any other European country.
Turkey is gearing itself up for the opening in 2023 — the centenary of the founding of the Turkish Republic — of the 2.5 hectare Museum of Civilizations in Ankara, which is due to showcase many of Turkey’s best cultural treasures.
However, archeologists working in Turkey point to what they say is a sharp contradiction between the government’s zealous attempts to retrieve artifacts and its apparent negligence toward valuable excavation sites that are the talk of the archeological world.
Among the most prominent is Allianoi, a Roman bath and spa complex in Izmir Province, which was flooded in February 2011 on the orders of the government after the Yortanli Dam was constructed.
“Allianoi was destroyed despite our efforts to save the baths. The government preferred profit over the preservation of such an important heritage site,” said Ahmet Yaras, an archeologist at Thrace University.
Yaras, who spearheaded the efforts to save the archeological site, has been refused a digging permit for the past three years.
“It feels like I’m being punished by the Turkish government because I tried to save Allianoi,” he said.
The eastern garrison town of Zeugma from 300 BC is another historical site lost to the waters of a large dam project. Hasankeyf, a bronze-age town on the banks of the Tigris, is awaiting a similar fate.
In the central Anatolian town of Konya, the 5,000-year-old Askar Hoyuk burial ground was recently covered over with concrete and turned into a recreational area.
At Yenikapi, where a Byzantine harbor and 8,000-year-old human remains were found, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently outraged the archeological community by ordering the excavation there to come to a rapid end as it was holding up construction of the prestigious Marmaray tunnel underneath the Bosphorus, which is aimed at easing traffic congestion in Istanbul.
A Turkish archeologist, who did not want to be named, said he was heartbroken that the government appeared to be destroying sites at the same time as battling for the return of artifacts.
“I don’t understand the attitude of the government,” he said. “This contradiction is truly mind-boggling.”
“Of course, [the Turkish government] has the right to demand the return of certain artifacts, but they should never try to do this by threatening foreign excavation sites,” he added. “One thing should not be confused with the other.”
Asked if he felt Turkey had, if not a moral claim then a legal one, on the return of certain treasures, Parzinger said: “You have to understand that it was right at the time to bring these objects [to Germany] in order to protect them, but the times have since changed.”
The Pergamon altar, which is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Berlin, was narrowly saved from destruction in the 1860s by the German engineer, architect and archeologist Carl Humann.
“Many believe that the Pergamon altar stood in the Anatolian sun until the Germans dragged it away,” Parzinger said. “But the truth is that Humann had watched in horror as reliefs were being loaded into lime kilns … on the basis of contracts made according to the law governing antiques at the time, it was arranged for the reliefs to be brought to Berlin and so it was saved.”
He said that while the Turkish authorities had discussed requesting the return of the altar, Berlin had never received an official request.
The US Senate’s passage of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which urges Taiwan’s inclusion in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise and allocates US$1 billion in military aid, marks yet another milestone in Washington’s growing support for Taipei. On paper, it reflects the steadiness of US commitment, but beneath this show of solidarity lies contradiction. While the US Congress builds a stable, bipartisan architecture of deterrence, US President Donald Trump repeatedly undercuts it through erratic decisions and transactional diplomacy. This dissonance not only weakens the US’ credibility abroad — it also fractures public trust within Taiwan. For decades,
The government and local industries breathed a sigh of relief after Shin Kong Life Insurance Co last week said it would relinquish surface rights for two plots in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投) to Nvidia Corp. The US chip-design giant’s plan to expand its local presence will be crucial for Taiwan to safeguard its core role in the global artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem and to advance the nation’s AI development. The land in dispute is owned by the Taipei City Government, which in 2021 sold the rights to develop and use the two plots of land, codenamed T17 and T18, to the
The ceasefire in the Middle East is a rare cause for celebration in that war-torn region. Hamas has released all of the living hostages it captured on Oct. 7, 2023, regular combat operations have ceased, and Israel has drawn closer to its Arab neighbors. Israel, with crucial support from the United States, has achieved all of this despite concerted efforts from the forces of darkness to prevent it. Hamas, of course, is a longtime client of Iran, which in turn is a client of China. Two years ago, when Hamas invaded Israel — killing 1,200, kidnapping 251, and brutalizing countless others
Taiwan’s first case of African swine fever (ASF) was confirmed on Tuesday evening at a hog farm in Taichung’s Wuci District (梧棲), trigging nationwide emergency measures and stripping Taiwan of its status as the only Asian country free of classical swine fever, ASF and foot-and-mouth disease, a certification it received on May 29. The government on Wednesday set up a Central Emergency Operations Center in Taichung and instituted an immediate five-day ban on transporting and slaughtering hogs, and on feeding pigs kitchen waste. The ban was later extended to 15 days, to account for the incubation period of the virus
RSS