Legal victory for Iranians and World Heritage: US Judge Orders Return of Ancient Achaemenid Relief to Iran
Independent Aggregator of Iran-related News/Events, Kodoom.com: According to New York Times, A New York Supreme Court judge on Monday ordered a Persian bas-relief dating to approximately 500 B.C. to be returned to Iran, the country from which authorities say it was stolen more than 80 years ago.
The bas-relief, which depicts a Persian guard, was seized in October by investigators for the Manhattan district attorney’s office from the Park Avenue Armory, where it was being offered for sale at an art fair.
As part of the ensuing negotiations, the two London-based owners of the relief agreed to surrender the item, valued at $1.2 million. Investigators say the item was reported stolen from Persepolis in 1936, and then was stolen a second time, in 2011, from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, to which it had been donated decades earlier.
In court papers, the district attorney’s office argued that no one can be a good-faith purchaser of a stolen work.
Rupert Wace, a well-known dealer in antiquities in London, and his partner, Sam Fogg, have said they acquired the work legally from the Montreal museum’s insurance company. But after investigators laid out a lengthy and detailed timeline they said showed that the item was in fact stolen, the men signed court papers agreeing to the surrender.
In a statement last October, Mr. Wace said he had bought the relief from an insurance company, who had acquired it legally from a museum in Montreal, where it had been displayed since the 1950s.
Since then, Iran's Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Organization has been seeking repatriation of the piece through legal channels.
The bas-relief is an eight-inch-square piece of carved limestone that was part of a long line of soldiers depicted on a balustrade at the central building on the Persepolis site. It dates to the Achaemenid dynasty — the First Persian Empire — and was made sometime between 510 and 330 B.C., when Persepolis was sacked by Alexander the Great.
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