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Illicit Antiquities |
Mosaics and heads of statues plundered from ZeugmaÖzgen AcarCumhuriyet Newspaper
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For more than 30 years Turkey has been constructing over 100 dams in southeast Anatolia, both to help solve the energy crisis and to provide the irrigation water necessary for regional development. One of these dams is being built on the Euphrates River. Called the Bireçik dam, after the nearby town of Bireçik, it has caused the inundation of the outskirts of Zeugma, an ancient town 800 metres away. Turkish and foreign archaeologists have worked on rescue excavations in this town, which is famous for its mosaics, but smugglers had already put Zeugma on the map long before either the dam or the archaeologists. The plundering of mosaics from Zeugma stretches back as far as the nineteenth century. One of the most important of these is a panel depicting the sea god Poseidon surrounded by personifications of Roman provinces within medallions. This mosaic is currently on exhibition, in pieces, in St Petersburg and Berlin. Then, for the last 13 years, archaeologists from Gaziantep Museum have been forced to undertake sporadic rescue excavations in response to illegal digging and smuggling. Attributions used in various museum catalogues to describe the origins of mosaics, such as 'East Mediterranean', 'near Syria', 'said to be from East Turkey' probably, in fact, refer to Zeugma. For example, there is the second-century AD mosaic in the North Carolina Museum of Art, said to be 'probably from East Turkey'. In 1987, five life-size statues made of limestone were found during a rescue excavation in front of a rock-cut family tomb after the museum had been alerted to an illegal dig. However, the heads of four of them had been already removed from their bodies, as if they had been guillotined. The bodies are now exhibited in the Gaziantep Museum (Figs. 1 & 2).
On 2 July 1992, museum archaeologists were warned about another illegal dig and arrived on the scene to find a tunnel large enough for a person to get through. At the other end of the tunnel they reached a building of Roman date (end of the second century AD) and on the floor they found an extremely well-preserved mosaic. This mosaic, measuring 3.25 ´ 1.45 m, depicted the wedding of Dionysos and Ariadne - a feast scene in which half-naked gods and goddesses were shown drinking to a musical accompaniment (Fig. 3). The artist who made this mosaic took great pains to illustrate the faces, using approximately 400 of the small colored tesserae, but made do with only 225 tesserae for the clothes and 144 for the background. The archaeologists decided to preserve the mosaic on site and it was locked up. Six years went by without incident, until one night thieves appeared, cut out two-thirds of the mosaic and made off with it. Interpol has been searching for it - unsuccessfully - ever since.
Acting on an application from the Turkish Government, in 1993 art theft agents from the New York FBI went to the Fortuna Gallery on Madison Avenue to seize a marble statue of a young man and fragment of garland taken from Aphrodisias, whereupon they noticed a beautiful mosaic from Zeugma. The FBI informed Turkish officials about this mosaic, which told the tragic story of Dionysos' daughter and Heracles' wife Deianira and one of the centaurs, Nessos (Fig. 4). By coincidence, a photograph of the mosaic turned up in the town of Nizip near Zeugma, among the colour prints of a deceased local photographer. Selim Dere, owner of the Fortuna Gallery, along with his cousin Aziz Dere, had already, some years earlier, played an important part in smuggling out of Turkey a marble sarcophagus depicting the twelve labours of Hercules. This had been found in Perge and was sliced up for smuggling. A few years after being arrested by Turkish police Selim Dere migrated to New York, where he opened an antiques shop. His cousin settled in Canada. The current location of this mosaic is unknown.
In September 1993, Professor David Kennedy of the University of Western Australia, who worked for one summer in Zeugma, found another tunnel left by looters. Excavations revealed a 2.5 metre square mosaic, from the middle of which the heads of two figures, one man and one woman, had been previously cut out and removed (Fig. 5). Then, in 1998, Canadian mosaic expert Sheila Campbell spotted two mosaics of the eternal lovers, Parthenope and Metiochos, known as the Romeo and Juliet of the ancient world, in the Ménil Collection of Rice University in Houston, Texas (Figs. 6 &7). She established that they were missing pieces of the mosaic found in Kennedy's excavation. The matter was put into the hands of the Turkish Government and Bernard Davezac, Director of the Ménil Collection. Both mosaics were returned to Gaziantep Museum on 19 June 2000 where experts are now restoring them prior to exhibition.
Finally, two years ago, in a rescue excavation, archaeologists found a piece of mosaic that has come to be known as Zeugma's Mona Lisa or the so-called Gypsy Girl. (Although some archaeologists think rather than a woman, it is a portrait of Alexander the Great.) Unfortunately, smugglers had already plundered pieces from around what has become the symbol of the rescue operations at Zeugma (Fig. 8).
First posted March 2001; Page design updated September 2006 |
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