A stunning gold and carnelian necklace displayed at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts for four decades is heading back "to its rightful home," per Smithsonian. The museum has returned the 2,500-year-old necklace to Turkey, from which it was likely stolen in 1976. Jewelry taken from Turkey's Bintepeler archaeological site show clear similarities to the necklace acquired from a London dealer in 1982. The museum says it knew only that the necklace came from a likely gravesite in Asia Minor. At the time of purchase, it wasn't unusual for museums to acquire artifacts "without really probing more deeply into its ownership history," Victoria Reed, the museum's senior curator for provenance, tells the Boston Globe.
Around 2015, an anonymous scholar reported the necklace's beads and fittings were nearly identical to those of artifacts excavated from Bintepeler in 1976 and displayed at Turkey's Archeological Museum of Manisa. Because Bintepeler had been excavated following reports of looting, the MFA investigated and determined its necklace may have come from the same site. "It seems that the elements that made up our necklace were probably smuggled out of the country and then strung together to form this piece of jewelry," measuring just eight inches long, Reed says, per CBS News.
Artnet sees the museum's admission as "a welcome level of transparency to the deaccessioning process as many museums in the US and Europe reckon with increased pressure to repatriate stolen objects." The MFA—which returned a child's ceramic coffin to a Swedish museum in April—reached a deal with Turkey's Ministry of Culture to have the necklace returned, and government representatives picked it up "in a special protective case," per CBS. It's "a symbolic moment that sends a strong message to the world, emphasizing the importance of international cooperation in the protection of cultural heritage," says Hilal Demirel of the culture ministry. (Meanwhile, Egypt wants Germany to hand over its Nefertiti bust.)
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