Fifteen of the 161 antiquities in the private collection of Cycladic antiquities will soon travel from America to Athens to be exhibited for the first time Museum of Cycladic Art which will begin on November 1 and will last one year. Among the unknown antiquities assessed by the YPPOA services are rare Cycladic figurines such as the 132cm tall figurine and the double figurine dating back to the 3rd millennium BC.

It is reported that a bill to ratify the agreement between the Ministry of Culture, the Museum of Cycladic Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Delaware Institute of Ancient Greek Culture will be submitted for discussion and vote in the plenary session of the House of Representatives. Thursday 8 September.

Sources on Ministry of Culture with direct knowledge of the matter, they confirmed to “K” that the collection belongs to the multimillionaire Leonard Stern, and spoke about the content of the agreement of the parties and how the phased repatriation of antiquities would be carried out.

The case began in June 2020 when Metropolitan Museum of New York informed the Greek Ministry of Culture that a particular collector wished to exhibit his collection and donate it to the museum, and asked if the Greek State was aware of the particular collection. The ensuing negotiations led to an agreement that the collection should become the property of Greece in accordance with the archaeological law. For this, according to the same sources, it was necessary to establish an intermediary body – the Institute of Ancient Greek Culture in Delaware, to which the collector transferred his collection with tax benefits provided by American law. “In this way, the Greek state acquires the entire collection without judicial intervention,” they characteristically note. The same sources specify that the New York Museum checked the legality of documents confirming the ownership of the collection, and found no problems. They also recall that in the case of the Steinhart collection, the Greek side was able to legally prove that only 47 of the hundreds of items in the collection were illegally exported from Greece.

The world’s first exhibition of part of the collection will take place at the Museum of Cycladic Art with 15 antiquities.

The negotiations took place, according to the same information, in cooperation with the Museum of Cycladic Art, and in fact the president of the Institute in Delaware will be the current president of the Greek museum, and the majority on the board of directors will consist of Greeks. . This department, they note, will also serve as an “intermediate link” for such cases in the future.

Exhibitions

The antiquities will first be exhibited at the Museum of Cycladic Art, and in the first half of 2023, the entire collection will be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, citing that it is a loan from the Hellenic Republic and the Ministry of Culture. In the coming years, the entire collection will gradually move to Greece and, according to information, will be displayed in other Greek museums.

The memorandum of cooperation with the New York Museum is designed for 50 years and provides, among other things, for the popularization of the antiquities of the Cycladic culture and the possibility of cooperation at the research level through the provision of scholarships to Greek archaeologists.

The news of the return of the antiquities provoked a reaction from the Association of Greek Archaeologists, who expressed doubts about the method of repatriation.