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Meropi Kyriacou Honored as TNH Educator of the Year
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
ATHENS – Among hundreds of antiquities being returned to Greece from a British dealer who had the stolen goods is a vase said to be from the early 5th Century B.C. which could be a forgery made in the 1990s.
The Ministry of Culture touted the recovery, but Christos Tsirogiannis, an archaeologist based in Cambridge, England, said he was surprised to find that among them was an olpe vase for wine – among treasured ancient objects that will be coming home.
He told the British newspaper The Guardian that if the ministry had conducted proper studies it would have found the vase was found to be a fake in 1998, among many examples of forged decorations on ancient vases – in this case, with an added modern design of a satyr and a goat.
Using worthless authentic materials to create a valuable fake is a typical technique used by forgers and he lamented the Greeks research as “absolutely shameful” for not vetting the authenticity.
Culture Minister Lina Mendoni, an archaeologist, had claimed the ministry had “worked systematically and methodically” on the collection, particularly over the past three years.
She announced on the official website that sculptures and vessels were among 351 objects that were being repatriated after a 17-year negotiation with the liquidated company of the antiquities dealer Robin Symes.
In 2005, Symes served a jail sentence for disregarding court orders over the sale of an Egyptian statue, with the judge dismissing his explanation as “a calculated deception,” the paper said.
In 2016, Italian and Swiss police recovered marble statues, among other treasures stolen from Italy and allegedly stored by him at the Geneva Freeport in Switzerland.
The olpe was among antiquities listed by the Greek ministry of culture: “Attic red figure olpe with a decoration of a satyr carrying a large amphora. A goat appears in the background of the decoration. The decoration was made by the Six technique (one of the decorative techniques of ancient Greek vase painters.) Early 5th century BC,” it added.
But, in 1998, the leading scholar Dietrich von Bothmer had published his findings on that same olpe, concluding that its decoration was a “modern forgery,” the paper said, no explanation how the ministry missed that.
He argued that a satyr and a goat had been painted on an authentic black-glazed olpe “with a generous amount of flaking or abrasion to give it an ancient appearance,” to make it appear genuine.
Tsirogiannis said the ministry was apparently unaware of that research and discovery and said it was a failure “because it exposes the real level of research, although they had 17 years to conduct that properly, and especially as the culture minister is herself an archaeologist. She is triumphantly including it as an early 5th-Century vase because of the decoration. It’s mind-blowing, extremely embarrassing.”
Tsirogiannis heads illicit antiquities trafficking research for the UNESCO chair on threats to cultural heritage at the Ionian University in Corfu and he has identified 1,664 looted objects within auction houses, commercial galleries, private collections and museums, alerting police authorities and governments and helping to repatriate items.
“We don’t know which other objects they have repatriated. Maybe there will be more unfortunate surprises,” he said in another shot.
A ministry spokesperson told the paper that Mendoni couldn’t comment because the government was being dissolved ahead of a second round of elections June 25 and an interim put in place.
But the statement added that, “In cases of recovery of illegally trafficked antiquities, any further research on them is carried out when the antiquities are back in Greek museums. Only then it is possible to study them thoroughly and, if required, to carry out laboratory analyses.”
