COPENHAGEN: Denmark’s Glyptotek museum will return to Turkiye the bronze head of Roman Emperor Septimius Severus that it has had on display for more than 50 years, it said on Tuesday.

The announcement brings to an end an 18-month dispute with Ankara, which claims the piece was part of a statue looted during an archaeological dig.

“The Glyptotek has decided in favour of Turkiye’s request to return the ancient bronze portrait,” the museum said in a statement.

A statue of the Roman emperor, who lived from AD 145 to 211, spent decades in the United States as part of a private collection that loaned it to New York’s Metropolitan Museum.

It was sent back to Turkiye almost two years ago — minus the head. Ankara said the missing head was in the Danish capital, on display at the Glyptotek in Copenhagen for over 50 years.

In 1979, a former museum curator said he believed that the head — acquired in 1970 without any information about its exact origins — corresponded to the decapitated statue in the US.

The two bronze pieces were reunited for an exhibition and examined by Turkish archaeologist Jale Inan.

Based on his conclusions, the Turkish embassy in Copenhagen then formally asked Denmark in May 2023 for the head to be returned, a request Copenhagen initially met with scepticism.

“I’m not saying that they don’t belong together. I’m just saying that we are not as sure as we perhaps were 25-30 years ago,” Glyptotek’s director of collections Rune Frederiksen said at the time.

It has never been established beyond a doubt that the two pieces belong together, but the Danish museum has concluded that the head is from Bubon, a Roman site in Asia Minor, in the historic region of Lycia on what is now Turkiye’s Mediterranean coast.

“Unique archaeological finds from Bubon have been sold illegally to collectors and museums around the world,” the head of the museum, Gertrud Hvidberg-Hansen said in a statement on Tuesday.

“In recent years, many of these items, especially those held in collections

in the United States, have been returned.” “These factors have contributed to our decision to comply with the restitution request from Turkey,” she said.

Published in Dawn, November 27th, 2024