The Denver Art Museum has returned a marble head of a bearded man stolen from the ancient city of Smyrna to Turkey. This marks the latest in a growing list of successful restitutions tied to the country’s renewed campaign to reclaim its cultural heritage from museums worldwide.
The sculpture’s provenance indicates it was likely carved in the fifth century BCE in Smyrna—the ancient Greek name for present-day Izmir. Situated on Turkey’s Aegean coast, the city is among the world’s oldest continuously inhabited seaports and trade centers, a distinction that has also made it a frequent site for archeological excavations and, inevitably, a target for illicit antiquities trafficking. According to Turkey’s Culture and Tourism Minister, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, the marble head was unearthed in the city’s agora, or public gathering place.
“Through cooperation and constructive dialogue with the Denver Art Museum, we have brought this artifact back home,” Ersoy told the Turkish news outlet Yeni Şafak. The sculpture is now on view at the İzmir Archaeology Museum.
In recent years, Turkey has notched a series of successes in its efforts to recover looted antiquities from collections worldwide, including its first official repatriation of artifacts from Canada in March. The return comprised seven manuscript pages bearing texts in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, two rare printed pages, and two examples of modern calligraphy, dating from the 17th to 19th centuries.
The manuscripts were of particular significance for their wide-ranging contents, encompassing historical interpretations of Sufism, accounts of world events, literature, and Islamic jurisprudence. Turkey identified the artifacts’ location in 2024, when they were intercepted by the Canada Border Services Agency while en route from Istanbul to Vancouver. The case was then referred to the Canadian Ministry of Heritage, which initiated discussions with Türkiye over the technical and legal procedures for their return.
In another sign of mounting pressure from New York prosecutors on museums and private collectors, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and a private American collector returned dozens of looted antiquities to Turkey in 2024.
The repatriations were tied to a years-long investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit into plundered archaeological sites across Turkey. According to the office, the objects were removed from these sites and later exhibited and sold by dealers relying on falsified provenance records. The Metropolitan Museum of Art returned a 2nd-century marble head of the Greek orator Demosthenes; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts relinquished a group of 6th-century BCE terracotta reliefs; and California-based collector Aaron Mendelsohn surrendered a Roman bronze statue of an emperor worth $1.33 million.
At the most recent handover ceremony, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy vowed that Turkey “will continue to protect our cultural heritage with determination.”
