The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has facilitated the return of 29 antiquities, collectively valued at $3m, to their rightful home in Greece. A ceremony was held earlier this month at the Consulate General of Greece in New York to mark the occasion and formally hand over the objects<\/p>\n
The artefacts include pieces implicated in trafficking networks conducted by the smugglers Robin Symes<\/a> and Eugene Alexander. Symes, a British art dealer who died in 2023, fell from grace after a 2016 probe by the Carabinieri, Italy’s specialist art investigation squad, revealed him to be the ringleader of an international criminal looting syndicate that spanned decades.<\/p>\n \u201cThese 29 extraordinary pieces were recovered thanks to the hard work of our prosecutors and analysts,\u201d Bragg in a statement. \u201cThe impact of these significant trafficking networks are still felt in New York, and we will continue to work alongside our partners around the globe to return stolen objects.\u201d<\/p>\n Notable objects in the repatriated trove include a sculpture dubbed “Bronze Foot in the Form of a Sphinx”, which actually might depict a siren; it was seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2025. Dating from the 600BC, a trafficker had sold it to Symes, who in turn sold it to a private collector who donated it to the Met in 2000.<\/p>\n Another piece, a bronze applique depicting a gorgon and dating from the 6th century BC, was originally attached to a bronze vessel. It depicts a running mythological female monster with snakes for hair, most popularly portrayed in modern day parlance through the story of Medusa. The bronze gorgon was sold by the trafficker Robert Hecht<\/a> to Fortuna Fine Arts, a gallery that is currently battling fraud charges in federal court. Fortuna sold the applique to a private collector who then loaned the artefact to the Met, where it was seized by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit earlier this year.<\/p>\n \u201cEach repatriation of Greek antiquities is a profoundly important event, vindicating the Ministry of Culture\u2019s policy in recent years,\u201d Lina Mendoni, the Greek minister of culture, said in a statement. “Greece is now internationally recognised as a country that has placed the fight against illicit trafficking of cultural heritage at the forefront of its agenda\u2014an issue directly linked to organised crime and terrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n Since Bragg took office as Manhattan’s District Attorney at the beginning of 2022, his office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit has recovered nearly 2,400 artefacts looted from 47 countries, worth a combined $260m. Earlier this year, his office returned eight artefacts<\/a> to Peruvian authorities and assisted with the repatriation of three sculptural objects<\/a> to Iraq.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has facilitated the return of 29 antiquities, collectively valued at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[3135,3138,3137,3139,9,24,55,54,56,3134,3136],"class_list":{"0":"post-2565","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-antiquities","9":"tag-antiquities-trafficking","10":"tag-greece","11":"tag-museums-heritage","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","15":"tag-new-york-city-news","16":"tag-ny","17":"tag-repatriation","18":"tag-restitution"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}