This story was brought to The Cook Report by a Turkish archaeologist who pointed out that Turkey had the largest trove of buried Greco-Roman artifacts in the world - and claimed that they were being systematically looted, laundered through some of the most prominent international auction houses and sold at a vast profit to wealthy collectors and major museums. Secretly filmed, the programme was offered a valuable Roman stone sarcophagus which the vendor offered to slice up so it could be shipped out as ‘a flat pack, just like Ikea’ and traced a Roman fountain stolen from a remote village which ended up in a Sotheby’s auction in London - no questions asked, apparently.
On a far grander scale, the team traced the travels of the Lydian hoard from the 7th century BC, for-part of the legacy of King Croesus (as in ‘as rich as’) which ended up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That’s where the programme took the penniless farmer who had unearthed it before losing it to local treasure-hunting criminals. He recognised every item and became so excited that the crew’s presence was revealed and they were unceremoniously thrown out.
The Cook Report proved that archaeologist was right about turkey being a target for looters and the Lydian Hoard was amongst a number of stolen treasures subsequently returned to Turkey. Cook confronted Edip Telli, the big-time, Munich-based dealer who had organised the deal - and Telli was subsequently extradited to Turkey where he was tried and imprisoned for an indeterminate time.
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21 янв 2022
