Turkey is used to ordering heads from Scandinavia and receiving pumpkins. This time he hopes it will be different, because it is not an extradition, but a return, but they are giving him extensions.
After the United States returned to them a splendid statue of Septimius Severus, many Turkish eyes were fixed on the only thing missing from their naked, yet integral, imperial. The head.
It was in March when the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) finally returned to Turkey three pieces on display, which its experts confirmed came from spoils. These pieces are now exhibited, along with a dozen restitutions, in the formidable Archaeological Museum of Antalya, a city famous for its beaches and extreme heat, which delight Russian tourists.
Among all these works, the exceptional 2.10 meter bronze sculpture of the founder of the Severa dynasty, who lived between the 2nd and 3rd centuries, stands out. However, this act of justice has spurred the Minister of Culture, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, to demand the full lot. Now all eyes are on Denmark, where a museum claimed, already in 1979, that it possessed the lost head of Septimius Severus, corresponding to the aforementioned torso.
However, after the claim, its manager, Rune Frederiksen, says he is not so sure. Now he is asking for two years for an international commission of experts to pronounce on it. The puzzle continues.
The Met exhibited the statue for a dozen years, as an anonymous loan in its “Greco-Roman courtyard”. The date coincides with the death of a Swiss merchant who was once linked to the looting of the Bubon site. This former center of worship of the imperial family, not far from present-day Antalya, was “cleansed” in 1967 by the concerted action of peasants and traffickers.
The Met, at the behest of the Turkish embassy and the Manhattan prosecutor himself, ended up accepting that this emblematic piece came from that loot of bronze statues, which had escaped the usual recasts. After going through an intermediary in Smyrna, by 1968 they were already in Boston. Today there would be Bubon pieces in half a dozen museums in the United States.
Well, most likely in Dant Square, in Copenhagen. In the Gliptoteka Carlsberg, founded 125 years ago by the collector Carl Jacobsen, who gives his name to the famous beer brand created by his father.
The Danish museum bought the piece in question in 1970, “on the antiques market”. Soon after one of his experts traveled to Indianapolis, where the “torso of Septimius Severus” was on display on loan. His impression was that it formed a whole with the newly acquired head. So much so that, although the Gliptoteka was unable to buy it, they obtained it on loan in 1979 and displayed it with the head superimposed, albeit in a not very convincing way. However, the most eminent Turkish archaeologist, Jale Inan, gave the pairing for good and blamed the wrong angle for the comic effect.
In the Turkish State, for its part, during those years of high tension in the streets, the whereabouts of a Greco-Roman emperor was not what worried them the most.
But eighteen hundred years after his death, past and present intersect. Turkey is today the country best connected by air with Africa. And Septimius Severus is, not surprisingly, the first Roman emperor of African origin. Born, moreover, close to Tripoli, where Turkey plays strong. And his fratricidal son, Caracalla, died in what is now Turkey.
Ersoy, by the way, was one of the only two ministers that Recep Tayyip Erdogan did not escape in his latest reshuffle. That this tourism entrepreneur is the Minister of Culture says a lot about the place he occupies in the Islamic-democratic government. On the other hand, more subscribed to the word than to the image – unlike the opposition – even if he makes an exception with the heritage. And if you have to pretend that the emperor doesn’t go naked, then you pretend. Who says that the imperial cult has died out?
