Albanian archeologists struggle to recover valuable artifacts amid a shady world of antique dealers and auction houses.

TIRANA | Standing behind a glass case, Albania’s Minister of Culture, Ardian Turku, elatedly declared that an ancient bust stolen from Albania nearly two decades ago had finally returned home.

“The bust of Asclepius has returned to Albania, where it naturally belongs,” Turku said in mid-May, adding that for centuries the sculpture had been “a witness to the value of our national heritage.” The bust was part of a series of sculptures that were excavated in Butrint, southern Albania, between 1928 and 1933 by Luigi Maria Ugolini, a favorite archeologist of Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

A UNESCO world heritage site located close to the border with Greece, Butrint is one of the best-preserved Roman sites in the Adriatic. Established first by local tribes and later as a Roman colony, Butrint’s later history was turbulent, caught in power struggles between the waning Byzantine Empire and its mainly Norman, Venetian, and Ottoman enemies.

Just like the minister, Butrint National Park cofounder Auron Tare still heaves with emotion as he recalls the day in 1998, when, scavenging in a pile of old folders in the Ministry of Culture, he came across a series of letters from a U.S. professor of archeology, Elisabeth Bartman.

The documents, which were forwarded to the ministry by the Albanian Embassy in Washington, D.C. and had been collecting dust for years, reported that Bartman had come across a listing by a New York art dealer for the sale of an antique head of the Roman Empress Livia, which she believed had been discovered by Ugolini.

Together with Asclepius, the statue of Livia was lost after the collapse in 1991 of the Stalinist regime in Albania. In the subsequent chaos following the collapse of communism, the Butrint museum in which Ugolini’s discoveries were displayed had been raided and several precious statutes stolen.

Beside these, thieves also took away several other priceless items that were only returned after years of traversing the globe in the hands of criminal gangs, art dealers, and auction houses.

While the statue of Livia faced years of official neglect before heading home, the return of the Asclepius bust has opened a new set of legal and ethical challenges for Albanian authorities in their struggle to bring home stolen antiquities.

A FAIRY-TALE ENDING

According to Tare, after receiving the letters in 1995, for years the Ministry of Culture made no apparent attempt to recover the statue. “I contacted the embassy in Washington and they gave me the name of Robert Hecht, the antiquities dealer in possession of the statue of Livia,” said Tare, who from 1994 until 2000 served as head of the local office of the Butrint Foundation, a British charity that has strived to preserve the UNESCO site during the tumultuous past two decades.

Hecht – now on trial in Italy on charges of conspiring to traffic in looted artifacts – made his name in the trade in the 1950s and has been involved in several court cases in recent years over sales of Turkish and Italian relics. At about the same time that Bartman had notified the Albanian authorities, Hecht offered the bust to the Glyptothek museum in Munich.

However, the museum’s director of antiquities, Raimond Wunsche, recognized the piece as being from Butrint and contacted the German police. On being informed that it was stolen, the dealer withdrew the offer. “When I contacted Hecht in 2000, he responded that he was in possession of the statue, but that it was just in his safekeeping and he had no intention of selling it,” Tare recalls.

Eventually, after a meeting in Paris with Tare, Hecht agreed to return the statue to Albania. “Despite the fact Hecht has a long series of legal cases filed against him by several countries for trading in stolen artifacts, I believe he was correct in returning the head of Livia,” Tare adds.

The return of that statue to Albania in 2000 made headlines across the world and is considered a success story by cultural heritage experts. The publicity prompted the Albanian authorities to seek the return of other statues stolen from the Butrint museum that the Greek authorities had seized from criminal gangs.

These particular items were restored to their rightful place in 2002 and 2007. Among them were a portrait of the Roman statesman Agrippa, a head of a young woman, a headless figure of Nike (or perhaps a young girl), and a torso of Apollo.

“These statues are very valuable for Butrint, because they are an intrinsic part of that site,” Brian Ayers, the director of the Butrint Foundation, said. “The most critical thing for any archeological object is its relation to the site.”

According to the former head of the Albania National Monuments Institute, Lorenc Bejko, the return of Livia and the other statues is a success story in the heritage world. “The psychology of the antiques collector is very interesting,” Bejko said, referring to the dealers in these artifacts. Collectors may even “sleep in the same room as their artifacts for several years,” he said, but eventually they try to make their treasures public.

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