Legal Battle
The efforts made by successive Turkish governments to retrieve the collection were incited since the very beginning and followed until conclusion by the journalist Özgen Acar. Acar had chanced upon some pieces of the collection for the first time in 1984 in a Met Museum catalogue and had informed Turkey's Ministry of Culture of their clear provenance, while he also wrote several articles and pursued the bureaucratic channels within Turkey with insistence throughout the affair. He acted as a voluntary envoy of the Ministry within the frame of the judicial case launched in New York City in 1987 and brought to conclusion in 1993, at the same time as he was named consultant in the larger framework of the Turkey's participation in the work carried out by UNIDROIT regarding the protection of historic, cultural and religious heritage. Acar's name is also synonymous in Turkey for the retrieval of another set of smuggled archaeological goods, termed "Elmalı Treasure" in reference to their site of origin, the town of Elmalı in southwestern Turkey, and involving this time Lydian coins and extremely rare decadrachms dating from the period of the Delian League, with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts as his opposite party.
Read more about this topic: Karun Treasure
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