Dallas museum set to return stolen mosaic to Turkey
The Dallas Museum of Art voluntarily returned an ancient marble mosaic in its collection to Turkey on Monday, after determining that the work — which dates from A.D. 194 and shows Orpheus taming animals with his lyre — was probably stolen years ago from a Turkish archaeological site.
The decision, part of a new plan by the museum to court exchange agreements with foreign institutions more actively, comes at a time when the Turkish government has become more aggressive in seeking antiquities it believes were looted from its soil.
The artwork in question had been at the DMA since 1999. Director Maxwell Anderson came on board in January, and amid all the other recent changes under his command — free admission, free memberships, a deluge of grants and gifts — he’s adding another.
“The Turkish ministry maintains a website that shows illicitly removed objects,” Anderson said at a news conference Monday. “And on that website were a series of Orpheus mosaics from the site of Edessa illegally removed, starting in the 1950s.
“The mosaics included examples that were virtually identical to this one,” he said. “And with the same Seriac inscription, specifically identifying the site from which the mosaic was obtained. And therefore, it raised questions for me.”
Anderson wrote the Turkish embassy, looking for specifics about the work. Turkish officials came forward with the photograph of the mosaic, “which is all you need to know,” he said.
In recent months it has pressed the Metropolitan Museum of Art and several other museums around the world to return objects and, to increase its leverage, it has refused loan requests to some.
The Met says that the objects sought by Turkey were legally acquired in the European antiquities market in the 1960s before being donated to the museum in 1989.
Last year the Pergamon Museum in Berlin returned a 3,000-year-old sphinx, which Turkey said had been taken to Germany for restoration in 1917. But German officials say Turkey has continued to deny loans of objects for exhibitions because of claims to other objects in the Pergamon collection.
The Dallas mosaic, bought at auction at Christie’s in 1999 for $85,000, is thought to have once decorated the floor of a Roman building near Edessa, in what is now the area around the city of Sanliurfa in southeastern Turkey.