Thieves have stolen the Gouden Meerbeker trophy from the Ajax Museum in the Amsterdam ArenA.
The Gouden Meerbeker, a cup, was won by Ajax three times in a row between 1917 and 1919. The theft took place during the day when perpertators forced open one of the glass showcases. Ajax have also reported that a golden baseball bat positioned next to the Meerbeker was taken. Thijs Lindeman, director of the Ajax Museum, said: "This is really terrible. I saw immediately that the cup was missing. The items are all insured but in these cases insurance doesn't help a lot. "The emotional value is so much higher. I hope that the Ajax family will mobilise itself to get the cup back where it belongs, in the Ajax Museum." Wim Schoevaart, Ajax's 85-year-old archivist, said: "This is a great loss for the club.
"Besides the Championship trophies, this was the most important prize that Ajax has won in those years. The Gouden Meerbeker was unique. "I know no other club that has, and now had alas, a real golden cup in its trophy cupboard."
http://www5.sbs.com.au/
Nazi-Stolen Art Returned to Owner's Heirs
By NADIA RYBAROVA The Associated Press
PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) - Authorities are returning 135 art works by European masters to the heirs of a Czech Jew whose collection was stolen by the Nazis, a museum said Thursday.
Arthur Feldmann was working as an attorney in Brno, 125 miles southeast of Prague, when he was arrested shortly after the 1939 Nazi invasion of what was then Czechoslovakia. There is no record that he was charged with any crime. Documents from that time say he died in March 1941 from unspecified health damage he suffered during his six-week prison stay. Feldmann had sold much of his collection of more than 700 drawings in 1933, including works attributed to Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt. But the rest of the collection was confiscated and the 135 drawings by Dutch, Italian and Germany artists were placed in the Moravian Gallery in Brno after the war. On Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Moravian Gallery said the museum turned over the drawings last month to Anne Webber of the London-based Commission for Looted Art in Europe.
The commission is awaiting a license to export the works, still in the Czech Republic, to heirs in Israel who wish to remain anonymous, said the spokeswoman, Andrea Polackova. Feldmann's wife was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in January 1942 and later perished at the Auschwitz death camp. But his two sons managed to leave the country. Feldmann's son claimed the drawings in 1960, but his claim was rejected by the former Communist regime for unspecified reasons. A new claim by Feldmann's grandson in 1995 was turned down because legislation at that time allowed only restitution of property confiscated after the 1948 Communist takeover. A new law, passed in 2000, allows for art stolen by the Nazis to be claimed by the original owners or their heirs.
Polackova said that the gallery hopes to purchase the collection's five most valuable drawings - works by Hans von Aachen, Anton Kern, Alessandro Casolani, Monalto and Johann Christoph Schuerer worth some $166,600. ``There are some indications they may be willing to sell,'' Polackova said.
Webber could not be reached in her London office on Thursday but culture ministry official Pavel Jirasek said that it appeared the ``negotiations will end successfully.'' ``We already got from Mrs. Webber a request for the export permit, and these five drawings are not included in it,'' he said. Last year, the Commission for Looted Art in Europe made a claim for four drawings, also believed to be part of Feldmann's collection, displayed in the British Museum in London. The museum acknowledged the claim and is cooperating with the commission ``to find the speediest possible solution,'' the commission said in a statement in October.
Lawyer offers to get stolen art back
17 April 2003
AMSTERDAM — An Amsterdam lawyer has offered to act as an intermediary for a client who wishes to return several priceless paintings stolen from Dutch museums in the past 12 months. Vincent Kraal told the Zembla television programme to be screened tonight that his client has art works taken from the Van Gogh museum, the Frans Hals and the Rijksmuseum. The public prosecutor, NOS news reported, is not interested in Kraal's offer and has asked him to co-operate in the search for the art thieves. Kraal's televised offer has raised a few eyebrows because it is not the first time he has put himself forward as a mediator between art criminals and the authorities. In the early 1990s, he agreed to a controversial deal with the public prosecutor, leading to the return of two stolen Van Gogh paintings to the Noordbrabants Museum. In 1998, Kraal announced his career as an intermediary was over after police found stolen canvasses during a search of his office.
The Zembla programme will also feature criticism of what it says is the appalling record the Dutch police has in catching art thieves. The programme says that private art owners, museums, traders and foreign police forces have continually complained of the lack of expertise within the Dutch police since the special CRI art unit was abolished. Now, one officer is assigned to co-ordinate the national effort to prevent art crime, compared with the 35-person police unit in France.
http://www.expatica.com/
Turks seek ban on tile sale
Turkey's culture minister is trying to halt the sale of antique mosaic tiles at Christie's auction house later this month, saying they may have been stolen. Erkan Mumcu said the 17th Century Ottoman tiles may have been taken from an Istanbul mosque, a claim the auction house denies.
Turkish authorities believe they were possibly taken from the Yeni Cami (New Mosque) in Istanbul. Mr Mumcu said the Turkish foreign ministry had already started procedures to try to prevent the sale, which happens in London on 29 April. "I believe we will prevent it," Mr Mumcu said. "We will most likely get these back." The mosque first reported that tiles had been stolen in February 2002. Several people were arrested and some tiles were recovered. Under Turkish law it is illegal to sell antiquities - which include items from the country's Roman, Christian, Byzantine and Ottoman times - but thefts and sales still occur. But Christie's said the tiles are "definitely not the tiles" being sought by the Turkish authorities.
Private collection
A spokeswoman for the auction house said the tiles had been offered for sale last April, but did not sell. She said they had been in a private collection for more than 20 years. They had been bought by the seller in the Netherlands in 1980. The tiles, which are being sold as Lot 160 in the auction, are expected to reach between £1500 and £2000. The Christie's website lists the tiles as being "very similar indeed to some of those in the Yeni Cami. "The present tiles have the same colour scheme, the same border design and the same inner rope-pattern border as those in the mosque," the website said. They are described as Iznik tiles, after the north-western Turkish province where they were made.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
Looters May Have Destroyed Priceless Cuneiform Archive
By Guy Gugliotta Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 18, 2003; Page A23
Looters at Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities pillaged and, perhaps, destroyed an archive of more than 100,000 cuneiform clay tablets -- a unique and priceless trove of ancient Mesopotamian writings that included the "Sippar Library," the oldest library ever found intact on its original shelves.
Experts described the archive as the world's least-studied large collection of cuneiform -- the oldest known writing on Earth -- a record that covers every aspect of Mesopotamian life over more than 3,000 years. The texts resided in numbered boxes each containing as many as 400 3-inch-by-2-inch tablets. The Sippar Library, discovered in 1986 at a well-known neo-Babylonian site near Baghdad, was one of the archive's crown jewels. Dating from the sixth century B.C., it comprised only about 800 tablets, but it included hymns, prayers, lamentations, bits of epics, glossaries, astronomical and scientific texts, missing pieces of a flood legend that closely parallels the biblical story of Noah, and the prologue to the Code of Hammurabi, the ancient Babylonian lawgiver. "This is the kind of discovery that one waits 100 years to see," said Yale's Benjamin Foster, curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection. "And now we'll never have another chance. It's a tragedy of the first order." Foster said only about two dozen of the Sippar Library tablets have been fully analyzed and published. UCLA Assyriologist Robert Englund noted that while some of the Sippar material was similar, at least in part, to works in earlier finds, "the vast majority of at least 100,000 texts in the archive are unique, very poorly documented and barely studied, if at all. I'm more fearful for these losses." The extent of the damage is not yet known, but experts at a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization meeting in Paris yesterday confirmed that looters smashed or stole thousands of tablets. McGuire Gibson, an Iraq specialist at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, told reporters that he had spoken with museum officials in Baghdad, and that the archive "has apparently been lost."
The Bush administration, warned by U.S. scholars early this year about the museum's vulnerability, has reaped harsh criticism for failing to prevent the looting, which was not challenged by U.S. soldiers patrolling Baghdad's streets. While early concern focused on the destruction of world-famous artifacts, the small corps of linguists, Assyriologists and epigraphers who study early writings -- perhaps 200 experts worldwide -- was distraught over the lost texts. Stony Brook University archaeologist Elizabeth Stone was a graduate student in 1975 when she spotted a cuneiform exhibit related to her dissertation. Iraqi museum authorities told her she didn't have the credentials to merit special access. "So I came back in 1986, and they said it would be fine, except they had put the tablets in vaults to keep them safe from bombardment during the Iran-Iraq war," Stone recalled. "Now I'll never see them." Cuneiform -- a Latin derivative meaning "wedge-shaped" -- began between 3,500 B.C. and 3,000 B.C. as a sign language in which one picture denoted one object. Over the next 3,000 years, it evolved so that symbols -- wedges, cones and nail-shapes carved with a stylus -- could also signify ideas, syllables, vowels and other orthographic elements. Cuneiform was the written language of the Sumerians, who dominated Mesopotamia until the Akkadians replaced them around 2,500 B.C. and eventually adopted their script.
Cuneiform was also used by other peoples of the region before finally being superseded by Aramaic around the time of Christ. Because different populations used cuneiform, scribes routinely produced bilingual and even trilingual texts and glossaries. "This was the key to translation," Englund said, and linguists began deciphering the tablets in the 19th century. Because the ancient scribes fired the clay after inscribing it, the amount of surviving material is both vast and all-encompassing, covering everything from creation myths to household expenses. "Probably about one million texts have been dug up, and 90 percent deal with the mundane details of everyday life," Englund said. "They even used the discarded ones to build up walls and as fill for floors." Until the completion of the National Museum in the 1920s, most Iraqi cuneiform was spirited out of the country and added to big international collections in Berlin, London, Istanbul and, in the United States, at the University of Pennsylvania. The new museum then began to accumulate tablets under a "50-50 split program" with excavators that lasted until the end of World War II. Since then, the museum has been taking everything found. "They had a stellar cross section of everything ever written in Mesopotamia in several languages about every imaginable subject," said Stephen Tinney of the Pennsylvania Cuneiform Dictionary Project. "You name it -- it was there." Scholars agree that Iraqi authorities readily granted access to the collections and kept them well-catalogued and cared-for -- but the material remained largely unstudied. One reason, noted Yale's Foster, was that wars beginning in the 1980s closed the museum for years at a time. Also unexamined were thousands of modest lots of material excavated from sites slated for inundation by hydroelectric projects. These tablets were hurriedly gathered and stowed in Baghdad to be analyzed during quieter times that never came. After the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, Iraqi scholars began leaving the country, drying up the pool of on-site expertise. Had that not been the case, scholars agreed, examination of a spectacular find such as the Sippar Library would have proceeded much more quickly. Iraqi archaeologists found the library in a previously unexcavated section of temple ruins at Sippar, 20 miles southwest of Baghdad. "The room is approximately 4.5 meters [15 feet] by three meters [91/2 feet], lined with sets of pigeon holes" along the floor, said Jeremy Black of Oxford University's Oriental Institute. "The tablets were still in the pigeonholes, intact and in place. We'd never found such a thing before." Black, working mostly from photographs, is one of three researchers who have published studies of the library tablets.
He acknowledged that "we don't know how much there is left to look at." And scholars may never know. "It's very hard to absorb what has happened here," said Johns Hopkins University Assyriologist Jerry Cooper. "It as if the entire Mall -- the National Archives and the Smithsonian -- had been looted, along with the Library of Congress." Englund, who is halfway through a project to digitize 130,000 early Sumerian texts, has suggested that scholars everywhere pool their photographs, drawings and descriptions of the museum's artifacts and cuneiform archives to create an electronic "virtual museum" from the wreckage of the old. And although U.S. officials have said the United States will help recover and restore the collection, it may be too late. Stone noted that cuneiform tablets, for all their longevity, do not travel well. "You put these things in the back of a truck and drive over a bumpy road, and pretty soon you have a sackful of dust." Correspondent Robert J. McCartney in Paris contributed to this report.