21
Nikolas Zirganosan
IN SOUTHERN GREECE, spring comes early. Although it was still March 2006, on the island of Paros in the Cyclades the first daisies of the year had broken through and, in the morning sunshine, their white and yellow colors lined the narrow road that snaked from the port of Paroikia up the hill toward the brilliant white village of Glyssidia. Shortly after 11:00 A.M., three cars left the port and quickly reached the point where the tarmac stopped and the dirt road began, sending clouds of dust billowing into the air.
Just short of Glyssidia the cars reached a plateau where there was a high stone wall with a house hidden behind it, and stopped. Eight men got out. Six were policemen, in plainclothes. One was an archaeologist and the last was the local prosecutor. Nobody had a moment to savour the view, which was breathtaking—the islands of Antiparos and Despotico were closest, the latter with its remains of a Doric temple, beautiful but uninhabited. Beyond them the smaller islands of the Cyclades receded into the blue distance.
Captain George Gligoris, head of the Greek Art Squad, had his mind on other things. A witty, handsome man in his mid-forties, Gligoris looks—and dresses—more Italian than Greek. He always wears sunglasses and in fifteen years as an undercover agent hasn’t ever worn a uniform. He was anxious that the morning’s operation would go well. He approached the gate in the wall, rang the bell, and waited for the housekeeper. Beyond the wall were a number of olive trees and in among them was the house, a house that—he knew—belonged to Marion True, an American woman, and, until very recently, a curator at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
The housekeeper let them in. As it happened, there were plenty of people in the house that day because Dr. True had phoned that very morning to tell her staff that she would be arriving in a few days to spend her Easter vacation on the island. The staff were preparing the house for her. “As we entered the living room,” Glirogis recalled later, “I spotted part of an Hellenistic idol placed on a stone windowsill. Surrounding the fireplace I saw that architectural fragments taken from ancient temples or monuments had been ‘built in’ to the walls as ornament while a Byzantine icon was resting on a table. The moment I saw them I took a deep breath of relief.”
Gligoris was acting on a tip-off that Dr. True’s villa contained unregistered antiquities. Greek law is very severe, but clear. Individuals can possess antiquities only if they are registered collectors, with special permission, or if they declare the antiquities to the authorities. Otherwise they are breaking the law. Paros is a hundred miles from Athens but most of that is the Aegean Sea so it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t cheap, for Gligoris to fly his team over. But as soon as he saw the first undeclared objects in the living room, he knew his trip hadn’t been wasted.
Then, inside the house, a most extraordinary thing happened. Everything went dark. The sky turned gray, a wind began, the temperature dropped sharply, and all the animals within earshot began making panicky noises. Sheep and goats bleated, turkeys cackled, hens clucked.
It was an eclipse of the sun.
“I took it as a good omen,” said Gligoris. “As if someone was leading me on, as if the twelve gods were on our side, giving me the ‘go-ahead.’ As the sun came out again, and we resumed the investigation, one of my men suggested we now had a name for our raid—‘Operation Eclipse.’ Yes, but we have a saying in Greece: ‘In addition to Athena’s help, you must throw in a hand yourself.’”
They did. They searched the house for many hours. Paros is famous for its beaches, its traditional architecture, and its rich and ancient past, with many archaeological sites dating back to the fifth millennium BC. It is also famous for the snow-white semi-transparent marble that it carries in its bowels—Parian marble was one of the types of stone used in the construction of the sanctuaries at Delos, Olympia, and Delphi. The Venus de Milo, the Praxitilean Hermes, and the Victory of Samothrace are all hewn from Parian marble. No wonder that the house at Glyssidia—built in the traditional Cycladic style, single-story with interlocking stone, painted white—was Marion True’s favorite retreat. She would spend most of her summers there, making frequent visits to the nearby island of Schinoussa to visit Robin Symes, Christo Michaelides, and his family.
A total of seventeen unregistered antiquities were discovered in her house that day of the eclipse, plus the Byzantine icon. There was a poster on display in the living room for the exhibition of the Fleischman Collection, which had been displayed at both the Cleveland Museum and the Getty Museum, under the title, “A Passion for Antiquities” (see pp. 115–118). As one of Gligoris’s men remarked, “That’s the passion that will lead all these people to their downfall.”
None of the antiquities found in the Glyssidia residence was of particular archaeological significance. But as a curator of antiquities, with so many archaeologists—Greek and non-Greek—passing through her house every year, it is surprising that none of her friends and guests advised Dr. True to take the appropriate steps to make her possessions legal. As it was, the eighteen ancient objects were confiscated and the case referred to the district attorney’s office.
The raid was more important than that, however. For the truth of the matter is that the Greek authorities had had Marion True in their sights “for decades,” hoping for a reason to look more closely at her activities. Since the 1980s, reports had started coming into the offices of the Greek art squad suggesting that she had been buying, on behalf of the Getty Museum, whole consignments of Greek antiquities of mysterious provenance—perhaps without any provenance at all. In the years before the Paros raid the Greek law enforcement agencies had twice come close to prosecuting her, but both times their investigations had foundered.
In the early months of 1997, fisherman off the coast of Preveza, a small port on the Ionian coast of Greece, south of Corfu, netted a most unusual catch. It was a bronze statue of an adolescent boy, five feet high, weighing 150 pounds. It was badly corroded and covered with sea shells but even so, its quality was obvious. It was subsequently identified as coming from the workshop of Polycleitus, who, with Myron and Praxitiles, is one of the most admired sculptors of the fifth century BC. This wasn’t just any sculpture, but the fishermen didn’t know it.
They brought the statue ashore secretly and put out feelers among the antiquities underworld, looking for a buyer. Unfortunately for them, they approached the wrong people. When they met the middlemen with whom they thought they had arranged a sale, they were held up at gunpoint and forced to give up the statue—for nothing.
Subsequently, the bronze was hidden under boxes of grapes in a fruit truck and driven north to Germany. (These details were pieced together later by Christos Kotlidas, who was serving in the Greek Art Squad at the time.) The statue changed hands before its journey across Yugoslavia so that it was several weeks before it arrived at the town of Saarbrücken, in Saarland, on the border with France and Luxembourg. The Greek smugglers then contacted the Austrian archaeologist-turned-dealer Christoph Leon, who was operating out of Basel in Switzerland (see pp. 199–200 and 287–289 for Leon’s other activities).
Nothing more was heard for several months, not until George Tzallas, the acting chief of the police department that investigates illicit antiquities, received a tip-off. It was May 21, 1998, and Tzallas learned from his informant that Christoph Leon was about to sell the bronze statue to Marion True. True, he was told, was offering $7 million on behalf of the Getty Museum, though there was believed to be another customer in the wings, a Japanese individual who had offered $6 million. Tzallas was told by his informant that Dr. True had viewed the statue “lying on a carpet at Leon’s house.”
Tzallas and Kotlidas immediately left for Germany, where they managed to persuade the Saarbrücken police to help them raid a hotel room occupied by a Greek immigrant, Michael Kotsarides. There was nothing incriminating in the room but, in the open-air parking lot of the hotel, they found his car, and, in the trunk, a wooden crate. Across the crate were stenciled the words, in English, “FOR EXPORT TO USA.” Inside, when they opened it, were 115 small archaeological items of ancient Greek origin, 312 ancient coins—and the bronze boy from Preveza.
So far, so good. The follow-up to the raid, however, was—to say the least—unsatisfactory. The Greek government never at any point asked for a statement from either Christoph Leon or Marion True. But, at the request of the German police, the FBI did question Dr. True. According to this report, she confirmed that she had indeed “seen the statue, displayed on a carpet in Leon’s residence, but turned down the sale when she realized he was acting on behalf of a third party. Having serious doubts concerning the legal status of Leon’s dealings, she became suspicious as to the artwork’s provenance. She never went so far as to make an offer, refusing to buy it.”
Interpol sent the FBI report to the Germans, who passed it on to the Greeks, adding a note of their own: “Please inform us if further investigations are deemed necessary.” They never got an answer from Athens.
Nonetheless, Kotsarides was extradited from Germany, tried, convicted, and sentenced to twelve years in prison. The statue of the youth was repatriated in 1998, restored at the National Archaeological Museum of Greece, and went on public display for the first time in an exhibition helping to celebrate the Olympic Games in Athens in the summer of 2004.
So the bronze boy did not get away. A very different story, also involving Marion True and Christoph Leon, had its beginning elsewhere in Germany in February 1992. On the twentieth of that month, the small “OHM” Gallery in Munich was packed with people. It was the opening night, the “vernissage,” of an exhibition by a promising young Greek painter, Athanassios Seliachas. The son of an Orthodox priest, “Celia,” as he was known in artistic circles, had finally managed to hold his first one-man show.
During the evening, and when his mind was obviously on other things, Celia was approached by three strangers—two Greeks and a Serb, people who appeared to have invited themselves to his show. Fourteen years later, he described what happened next.
They enquired about my connections in artistic circles. They told me they had something for sale and were looking for someone who might be interested. There, on the spot, they showed me photographs of what they wanted to sell. Then, on another day, again in the gallery, they brought me the object itself, concealed in one of those boxes they give you to carry away cakes at a pastry shop. The kind that are tied up with ribbon. They took the object out of the box and unraveled the paper it was wrapped in. And there was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. It was a Macedonian wreath made of solid gold. Solid gold. I was so impressed, so shocked I could hardly breath.
They asked if I could suggest someone who might buy the wreath. The first name that came into my head was Christoph Leon. I had never met him, but I had heard about him and I knew he was in the antiquities business. Later, I found out that they did indeed go to see Leon in Basel but the meeting, I understand, was not a success.
Apparently, Leon was willing to buy the wreath but the amount he offered—200,000 marks, according to Tzallas—was much too low. Celia continued:
So they came back to me in Munich and asked me a second time if I knew anyone else who might be interested. I thought about it and answered that for such a beautiful and important antiquity it was probable that the Getty Museum in Los Angeles might be interested. Again, I found out later that they contacted Marion True.
Marion True was sent photos of the wreath that depicted it in the condition it was found. “I have kept copies of these photographs to this day,” Seliachas said. And he showed them to me.
It appears, on this account, and in view of what happened later, that True would not buy from strangers. Did she prefer the security of trading with an established name, an intermediary who could distance her and the museum from the smugglers and/or the tomb robbers? At any rate, the two Greeks and the Serb went back to Christoph Leon who this time doubled his initial offer—to 400,000 marks.
What happened next isn’t clear but we do know that Marion True traveled to Switzerland to inspect the wreath, where it was being held in the vault of an unknown bank in Zurich. She saw the wreath in the company of Leon and the Serbian member of the trio who had approached Seliachas. He showed these photographs to me.
Nothing was settled then. True returned to Malibu and wrote to Leon that she refused to buy the golden wreath. Yet the wreath was to prove overpoweringly enticing. Six months later, True changed her mind and decided to propose the wreath’s acquisition.
Before she could do that, however, there were certain preliminaries to be complied with. In March 1993, the Getty formally notified the Greek and the Italian authorities of the museum’s intention to acquire two objects, a golden wreath and an incomplete archaic kore. They sent photocopies of photographs of both pieces.
The Greek Ministry of Culture responded, saying that it disagreed with the museum’s intention to acquire the two artifacts since, in its view, they could only have originated in an illicit excavation. But it added that it was unable to provide any specific details to expand and support its claim. For Greek archaeologists, it was obvious—as it had been obvious to Daniela Rizzo, Gilda Bartoloni, and other Italian archaeologists in regard to their antiquities—that such an important and beautiful object, had it been legally excavated, would have been widely published and known to everyone. It followed that the two acquisitions the Getty was planning to make must be dubious.
The Greek Ministry’s logic was not enough. On June 10, 1993, the Getty formally acquired the wreath, for $1,150,000 (paid to Christoph Leon), and the Kore, for $3,300,000 (paid to Robin Symes). In the curator’s report, prepared for the proposed acquisitions, under the heading referring to provenance, it was written that “the dealer will provide the standard warranties concerning title, export, and import in accordance with the antiquities acquisition policy of the J. P. Getty Museum.” Leon was listed as the seller, the previous owner as a “Swiss Collector,” and Switzerland was shown as the country of origin. In the warranty it was specifically stated by Leon that “the object was legally exported from its country of origin.”
The Getty must have thought it was home-free—nothing happened for four years. Then, toward the end of 1997, Greek Interpol received, from the German police, a file of documents which showed that Greek looters—immigrant workers in Germany—had smuggled the gold wreath out of Greece into Germany and had contacted True and Leon through Athanassios Seliachas (the painter), a permanent Greek resident in Munich. The documents included a signed affidavit that Seliachas had made to the German authorities.
Early in the new year, 1998, the Greek Art Squad asked the Ministry of Culture for help in following up the investigation but the culture ministry vetoed the initiative, confirming in a confidential memorandum (I have a copy of it) that it was then engaged in diplomatic moves with the Getty aimed at securing the return of the wreath. So the police were stood down. The so-called diplomatic initiative, however, never went anywhere and, after a few years, ran into the sand. Diplomacy was tried anew every so often but, by 2005, the wreath and the kore were still in Los Angeles.
In October of that year, an officer of the Greek police, now retired, gave me copies of a set of documents with Seliachas’ testimony and the golden wreath case file. Using these documents as a basis, I published a story on the wreath in Epsilon magazine.
Meanwhile, without my knowing it, there was a new special prosecutor in the headquarters of the Athens magistrates who read the article and decided to investigate the case. This man, Ioannis Diotis, was in many ways a parallel figure to Paolo Ferri in Italy. He had worked on some very tough cases. In particular, he had served many years in the antiterrorist department and was the man responsible for solving the case of the radical, leftist Greek terrorist group, “November 17,” or “17N,” as it was known. (The last victim of “17N” was Brigadier Stephen Saunders, defense attaché at the British Embassy in Athens, shot dead on his way to work in June 2000.)
Diotis, fifty-two years old, with a thick gray moustache and a strong voice, was an admirer of Giovanni Falcone, the Sicilian magistrate who was blown up by the mafia in 1992. Diotis began to look into the case of the golden wreath and it was he who realized that the Greek situation paralleled to an extent the situation in Italy—which was making news just then because, a few months before, in May 2005, the verdict against Medici was handed down. Diotis’s office was on the second floor of a hundred-year-old neo-classical building inside the compound of the Athens law courts. He began burning the midnight oil, catching up with all the documents that the Greek art squad had amassed in their files.
His first move was to meet Ferri. He and Gligoris traveled to Rome together in January 2006. For four hours they compared notes and exchanged information—about True, Hecht, Medici, Symes, and Christo Michaelides. And they decided to move forward on a cooperative basis. Two months later Gligoris decided to raid Marion True’s house at Glyssidia on Paros, in which those eighteen antiquities were found and confiscated. But that is not all they found.
The Greek police are old-fashioned. They rely very little on the surveillance technology the Italians use so much, but get most of their information from “sources” and tip-offs. And, during their raid on Paros, they were approached by a local informer who had something interesting to say about a nearby island and a family who had a vacation home there. The island was called Schinoussa and the family were the Papadimitrious. The informer said he had seen many antiquities “scattered around the yard” of the Papdimitirous’ house.
Back in Athens, after “Operation Eclipse,” Gligoris moved swiftly. His first move was to check whether any of the Papadimitriou family was legally registered as a collector of antiquities. They were not. So it seemed to Gligoris that a visit to the island might be timely.
It is a six-hour crossing from Piraeus—the port of Athens—to Schinoussa, and the Aegean Sea can be rough. In early April 2006, when Gligoris took his squad to mount the island raid, the sea was as bad as ever, a furious wind sweeping across the deck of the boat like a demon. Most of the men were anxious, preoccupied. One officer usually responsible for naming operations remarked on the wind that was blowing. “Just as the wind is blowing now, Aeolos [the Greek god of the wind] is gonna blow on Schinoussa. If anything is hidden there, it will be blown clear into the open.” Thus was born “Operation Aeolos,” on April 12, 2006.
By late morning, Gligoris and his men had reached the Saint Basil area of Schinoussa, an enormous private peninsula owned by the Papadimitriou /Michaelides family. At the gate, they informed the watchman that they were there to search the premises. They had with them a local prosecutor and an archaeologist. Before the watchman would admit them through the gate, he insisted on calling Dimitri Papadimitriou, son of Despina and nephew of Christo Michaelides, who was now head of the ship-owning family. The watchman gave the phone to Gligoris, who explained what was happening.
“Captain, do your duty,” said Papadimitriou.
The family compound was a narrow peninsula, with the sea visible on both sides. The road passed through an olive grove, then vineyards and storehouses, before the main house was reached. This house, facing south-east to avoid the wind, was a low-built construction, with a central courtyard embraced by the house on three sides, and containing an atrium and a swimming pool. The house had multicolored marble floors set into geometric patterns, not too dissimilar from the floors of the Getty Museum in Malibu. The passageways were set with cobblestone mosaics, winding between water fountains and earthen flasks full of flowers. The side facing the sea was dominated by a colonnade in the Roman villa style.
Scattered around the yard and the atrium, Gligoris and his men noticed dozens of antiquities. There were sphinxes, capitals of pillars, Byzantine tiles, an ancient metal anchor, columns, Roman fountains, Islamic mosaics, and marble lions from Roman times supporting a table made from a slab of Byzantine paving stone. Replicas of ancient sofas and other furniture were set alongside fountains hewn out of the natural bedrock.
Gligoris telephoned his superiors in Athens to report these early discoveries and to request back-up. Then he made another call and activated a second team he had standing by, back at headquarters. He ordered that this second team immediately proceed to search the residence of Despina Papadimitriou in the affluent Athens suburb of Psychico.
The search in Schinoussa took a week. Wherever they looked, they found antiquities—all of them unregistered. Outside the flower house stood two large Egyptian sphinxes made of pink granite. In the basement storeroom of the main house, in front of an array of metal shelves—on which were stored pillows and curtains, baskets and tools—stood a kneeling Venus, a copy of an original by Praxitiles. This Venus had known better times. She had once been exhibited at the Getty (she was featured in the Getty Museum Journal) but for reasons unknown had returned to the ownership of Christo and been forgotten. Next to the Venus was a marble face mask, ceiling panels from a Byzantine temple, two small lions, fountains, and architectural fragments from the Roman period. In another basement room, among huge refrigerators and deep-freezers—stacked on a shelf alongside candlesticks and Christmas decorations—were fragments of ancient pottery and a prehistoric obsidian stone blade.
Outside the front entrance to the villa, stacked on wooden pallets, fragments of a seventeenth-century French chapel were found. On the southern tip of the peninsula there was a chapel dedicated to Saint Basil and this too surprised the police and archaeologists. It had been built recently and was almost entirely made up of architectural segments originating from other Byzantine temples. There were bas-relief stone panels, columns, elaborate lintels, capitals, and Byzantine paving and stone masonry acquired from all over the Mediterranean.
Immediately behind, and close by the chapel, was a small grove where the remains of Christo were resting peacefully, next to those of his father, Alexander Votsi Michaelides.
Even the caretaker of the house was found to possess four ancient amphorae fished out of the sea, in his home in the village.
At the same time, in Athens, in Despina Papadimitriou’s house in Psychico, Gligoris’ second squad were discovering fourteen antiquities, all unregistered. Among them were nine very rare and perfectly restored pieces of Coptic weaving from the fourth-to-sixth centuries, from Egypt, two Mycenean amphorae, a marble head, and a ceramic idol with elephant feet, which the archaeologists rated as very rare, even unique.
In Schinoussa and Psychico, a total of approximately 300 ancient artworks had been discovered, all of which fell under Greek antiquities law. They had a combined value, according to the ministry of Culture, of 980,000 Euros ($1,120,000/£725,000).
The last day of the search on Schinoussa had arrived. Everyone was exhausted after nearly a week of non-stop searching. The police had, they thought, searched everywhere, including the chapel, the flower house, the pigeon house, and three private beaches. They were planning to leave in the afternoon for Athens when one of the crew entered an ironing room in a small storeroom, next to the entrance of the main villa and the caretaker’s quarters. On both sides were shelves packed with towels, bed linen and blankets. On the last shelf, meticulously wrapped in bed sheets, four large Byzantine frescoes were found. They were restored but still bore signs of violent removal from a religious monument. Inside a cupboard, between boxes of cutlery, they next came across three cardboard cartons containing hundreds of photographs and some photo albums with imitation leather binding.
At first glance, all the photos depicted extremely valuable antiquities of rare beauty. In another cupboard they also found many scarlet-colored albums with personal photographs of Christo and Symes, making excursions in the Cyclades and showing details of their private life on Schinoussa. Then there were snapshots of excursions made to archaeological sites abroad—Petra, in Jordan, was easily identifiable.
Gligoris looked through the personal photographs, but did not confiscate them. He did, however, take the photographs depicting antiquities. Such was the quality that everybody in his team was under the impression that these photos portrayed artifacts from museums or private collections gathered by Christo and Symes in order to study them. The junior police officers, impatient to get back to Athens, intended to file the albums simply as a “stack of photographs.” At that point, however, a more experienced officer, Dimitri Pitikakis, intervened. He insisted all the photographs be numbered on the spot and signed off. Thanks to him, what would have been a serious blunder was avoided.
Operation Aeolos brought havoc to the small island of Schinoussa. The three hundred residents were furious that the bad publicity, coming in spring, would have a negative effect on that summer’s tourist trade. Those fears dispersed later in the year when three times the number of usual visitors turned up. But in the first days, with the investigation in full swing, tensions mounted: it was a small, closed community where nothing was kept secret or left without comment.
In the village coffee shop the islanders were divided on the matter, since the Michaelides/Papadimitriou family had bestowed many charities on the local church, the elderly, and the island’s school. And they all agreed on one thing: the late Christo Michaelides was “the best lad” in the land. Gentle, polite, and refined, always helpful without making a show of it, he simply loved Schinoussa, and was loved in return by its inhabitants. Christo made a habit of spending his summers on Schinoussa, in the company of Robin Symes. Yet for Symes, there was not a good word from anyone.
The locals remember dozens of Greek celebrities who visited the island, although many foreign visitors and guests arrive anonymously in private yachts. However, the photo albums of Schinoussa portrayed the social entourage of Symes and Christos. Among others, there were dozens of photos of the marriage ceremony from Marion True’s wedding in Paros town hall, with the director of the Benaki Museum, Angelos Delivorrias, acting as best man. He remained a close friend for many years and bravely stood up for her after her forced retirement from the Getty. True, with the same dress from the wedding, the bridegroom, and Symes also appeared in the villa on Schinoussa, while other photos show the local archaeologist of Paros, Yannis Kouragios, another close friend of Marion True, carrying a bird in a cage next to Symes. Another shot showed Symes with an assistant operating a large pneumatic drill at work on the base of an ancient capital, later to be found incorporated into the architectural ornament of Saint Basil’s chapel.
Yet the most revealing were the photos from the dinner parties on Paros and Schinoussa with Christo, Robin, the collectors Shelby White and Leon Levy, the founder of the museum of ancient cycladic art in Athens, Dolly Goulandris, and many other guests present, mostly Greek and foreign archeologists.
It is something of an overstatement, often heard coming from some Greek officials, that Symes and Michaelides used Schinoussa as a base for trafficking looted antiquities. None of the witnesses interviewed by Gligoris on the island testified to anything like that. On the contrary, the villa on Schinoussa appears to have been used for the preparation and closing of deals, with important museum curators and private collectors in an idyllic setting. On the small and beautiful Cycladic island, in this huge, luxurious villa, antiquarians, museum directors, collectors, conservationists, scholars, and personalities of the economic and intellectual elite met with top dealers to discuss new deals, acquisitions, and purchases surrounded inevitably by the endless gossip of the world of art.
Christo, according to all existing reports, never appeared in person to market antiquities that originated directly from Greece. These were obtained usually from Italian middlemen such as Giacomo Medici, Gianfranco Becchina, and Nino Savoca. Officers of the Art Squad say they know, through experience, that illegally excavated Greek antiquities usually depart in trucks or commercial containers by road through one of two main routes. The northern route stretches through provinces that were previously parts of Yugoslavia and leads to Munich. This destination is reached often by antiquities originating from Crete, due to the large export of fruit and vegetables to local European markets. According to Greek police, the German route is used basically by smugglers from northern Greece. Every family in every village has a relative or friend that is an immigrant in Germany. Smugglers often use these connections in order to find a buyer and often undertake the task of exporting the artifacts themselves. These operations are usually small scale, confined to people from the same family.
The western route goes through Italy. Trucks cross over on ferries practically without any customs control due to the European common market. They end up in Switzerland, usually in the freeport of Geneva. The Italian route is more professional. Two or three Italian dealers with shady connections purchase looted antiquities from Greece on a big scale and undertake delivery including the illegal exportation. They have middlemen in Greece and decide the purchases through photographs. The Greek looter sends the photos, usually Polaroid, to Italy by post to the dealer. He in turn makes arrangements for delivery and places payment into a bank account drawn up in the name of the smuggler. The only time they are in danger of being exposed is while they are moving the artifacts. However, in a Europe without borders, who could possibly search millions of cargo shipments crossing over countries each year? Ancient artifacts furthermore are not like narcotics to be detected by trained dogs, or like illegal immigrants to be discovered through the use of biodetectors.
Back in Athens, late at night, as a member of the team that searched Schinoussa mentioned the story of how the photo albums were discovered, he remarked:
“They were bound in green-colored synthetic leather and the photos were of a professional standard, suitable even for publication.”
“How many of them?” I asked.
“Seventeen, I think.”
I felt I had been hit by electricity. In a flash, I thought back to one of my meetings with Peter Watson in London in 2001, when I was investigating the international network smuggling Greek antiquities, for the documentary “The Network.” At that time Peter had mentioned a series of visits he had paid to the Papadimitriou lawyers’ offices at Lane and Partners, in Bloomsbury Square in London. There, he had seen part of the archive kept by Symes, then in the hands of the Greek family. And he had mentioned seventeen green-colored leather-bound photo albums that contained antiquities handled by Robin and Christo.
The penny dropped. The photos from Schinoussa were probably exact copies of the original London file. If so, they were not photos showing objects in museums, for Symes and Christo to study, but were photos of their own objects, showing the most important antiquities to have passed through their business during the 1980s and 1990s, right up until the death of Christo in 1999. I also recalled that a spokesman for the Papadimitriou family, and also a couple of employees from the villa in Schinoussa, had claimed that shortly after Christo’s death, Robin Symes and an assistant had arrived at Schinoussa and, in the absence of the Papadimitriou family, destroyed files and inventories which were kept there. “For three days and three nights they were burning documents,” all three witnesses specifically reported.ao The albums, however, were apparently forgotten in the storeroom of Schinoussa and had escaped destruction. Whether copies or originals, accidentally or with the assistance of Aeolos, the Symes’ file of photos—that the Greeks and Italians, the prosecutors and archaeologists were so eagerly searching for—had landed in Gligoris’s lap.
I called him and told him what he had.
In November 2006, charges were brought against Marion True, Christoph Leon, the two Greek looters, now named as Georgios Tsatalis and Georgios Kagias, and the Serb middleman, L. J. Kovasevic, for their involvement in the golden wreath case. On December 13, Marion True arrived in Athens to meet with prosecutor Apostolos Zavitsianos. She had been summoned to testify concerning the golden wreath. She asked for a postponement, which she received, and finally testified in January 2007, when she pleaded “not guilty” and submitted a fourteen-page defense. She was released on bail, for $19,500.
By then, however, the Getty had announced, in December 2006, that it had agreed to hand over the wreath and the marble kore because, as Michael Brand said, “There was a disturbing element regarding provenance . . .” Among this evidence were Polaroids of the wreath found in Gianfranco Becchina’s archive. It seems that Becchina refused to buy the wreath but the Polaroids were a giveaway all the same. Even more important, though, were Seliachas’—the painter’s—photographs.
Simultaneously, the Greek prosecutor began an inquiry into the illegal trafficking and sale of the kore. After Marion True, Robin Symes is now being investigated by both the Italian and the Greek authorities. In fact, both the wreath and the kore were returned to Greece in March 2007.
The Papadimitrious were also charged with receiving illegal goods. Despina and her three children, Alexis, Dimitri, and Angeliki all denied the charges, claiming that the seized antiquities belonged to the deceased Christo, and that some of the objects mentioned in the indictment had been bought at Christie’s in New York the previous year, and hadn’t been unwrapped.
It did not go unnoticed, either by Gligoris and Diotis, by Ferri (who had been given copies), or by Daniela Rizzo that the Symes/Michaelides photographs were professionally made—and displayed antiquities of equal and at times higher quality than is shown in either Medici’s or Becchina’s Polaroid archive. Whereas the main body of the Italians’ inventory was made up of vases, supplemented by sculptures, bronzes, and marbles, the Symes archive—besides being huge—is chiefly comprised of marble sculptures, portrait busts, and bronzes of different kinds. The overall quality is breathtaking.
Some of these are shown in the photographic section. More than that, however, we can report that Christos Tsirogiannis, the young Greek archaeologist who accompanied Gligoris on the two raids, has now spent several months examining the Symes photographic record—and has made more than 200 matches between objects handled by him and antiquities in the world’s museums and auction houses.
The Schinoussa photo archive contains 2, 191 photos of 995 artifacts. All photos were shot by professional photographers except for just four Polaroids. On the reverse of the professional photos there are stamps of the studios, which range from Basel, Switzerland to Kingston-upon-Thames and Bond Street in Britain to Madison Avenue in New York.
Again according to Christos Tsirogiannis, out of the 995 artifacts shown in Symes’ archive, 610 are Greco-Roman, 136 are Egyptian and 249 are from the Far East, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia.
Symes’ photo archive was also examined by the distinguished Greek archaeologist, Professor Giannis Sakellarakis, who says that the photos from Schinoussa portray “meticulously restored artifacts of great artistic significance that could effectively constitute the contents of an entire museum in their own right.” He adds: “These antiquities are of great artistic achievement and they cover an extensive spectrum of civilizations and chronological periods dating as far back as the third millennium BC up to early Christian times.”
Tsirogiannis agrees that the person responsible for their selection must have an exceptionally keen eye since only significant artifacts were included, the creme de la creme, and no single item proved of inferior quality.
This fact is particularly noticeable where Greek pottery is concerned. In order to amass a collection of such outstanding quality, thousands of artifacts must have been inspected. This could only be the result of extensive looting of at least hundreds—if not thousands—of tombs and temples. Many artifacts appear unrestored in some photos, shown in the condition in which they were discovered, still smeared or encrusted with the remains of various sediments deposited during their prolonged stay in the ground or underwater, further clear indication that they derive from illegal excavations.
Comparing these unrestored antiquities with others that have undergone full restoration, it also becomes evident that the restorers employed by Symes must have been among the best in the field.
The photo archive from Schinoussa is important not only because it provides the best record of (part of) the most important unprovenanced antiquities handled by Symes but also because it allows us in many cases to match these artifacts with Polaroid pictures taken by the looters and also to match the same objects as they surface in the showcases of museums or important private collections. Here, too, as with Medici, the whole chain—from the ground to the great museums and collections—is gradually being exposed.
Here are some examples:
Symes Archive No. 1471, 1475–1483, 1950–1963: A marble statue of the Goddess Artemis, Hellenistic period.
In the American magazine House and Garden for June 1998, the statue is shown in the living room of a luxury villa belonging to an unnamed couple in Colorado, restored, surrounded by other antiquities—Cycladic idols, Etruscan vases, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculptures, and an art deco Eileen Gray lacquered chair. This same statue, of Artemis, matches one from the Medici photos, found in the Geneva Freeport. The statue has dirt on it and is not restored. Five other artifacts shown in the living room of the unnamed collector are also shown in Symes’ files from Schinoussa.
This Artemis is, in fact, the same as the one whose photograph was found in the glove compartment of Pasquale Camera’s overturned Renault the day he was killed near Monte Cassino. It is the same Artemis as the one Frida Tchacos eventually returned, having tried to mislead Ferri by first returning a fake version (see above, pp. 13–14 and 189–190). Apparently, Frida Tchacos sold the Artemis to an Italian middleman in Japan before the Colorado couple acquired it. Now it is exhibited in a museum in Rome.
Symes Archive No. 243: A black-figure amphora, Attic workshop by the “Swing painter,” dated to ca. 540–530 BC. Side A shows Dionysus flanked by two satyrs in dancing postures. On side B, the divine couple Athena and Hermes are conversing, watched by a mortal.
This vase, described as “exceptional” by Tsirogiannis, is shown in the Medici archives, depicted in five Polaroids, where the vase appears partially restored, with holes and joins visible, encrusted with dirt, and is placed on a wooden box. The same vase, fully restored, appears in the Goulandris Cycladic Art Museum in Athens (col. No. 716), with no provenance.
Symes Archive No. 715: Three stone vases.
According to Professor Sakellarakis, two of these three antiquities are typical Minoan stone vases very similar to others that were found in Messara region of Crete. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Messara region was heavily looted by Greek tomb robbers.
Symes Archive No. 701–709: A Roman bronze head of a young man.
These black and white photographs comprise two of the four Polaroids in the Symes archive. On the back of the photos is written: “Photograph of head before clearing [or ‘cleaning’?] via R. Symes.”
Elsewhere in the archive, there are five photographs (not Polaroids) of the same object after restoration. Beside one photo there is a typed note: “The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, No. L.72.79.5. Lent by the Getty (head b.)”
Symes Archive No. 2205–6: A marble sculpture, Youth with jumping weights.
These are also Polaroid pictures. The statue is shown in the process of restoration. The same artifact is in Symes archives No. 1996–2000, semirestored, and can also be found on the Cleveland Museum of Art website, restored, with the indication: “Italy, Rome, mid 1st century, No. 1985.79.” No provenance is given. The website underlines that the item is not on display.
Symes Archive No. 1768: A marble head.
This object is also shown in the Medici archive, in two Polaroid photographs. The same object was sold in a Sotheby’s auction, in New York, sales catalogue, 12 June 2003, page 32–33, No. 30.
Symes Archive No. 1767: Marble statue of Zeus enthroned.
In Symes’ photographs it is shown before restoration, apparently as it came out of the sea. The same object appears in the Getty museum, No. 92.AA.10. It is described as “Greek, about 100 BC., marble.” No provenance is given but the museum’s website entry reads: “This statuette may have served as a cult statue in a private shrine of a wealthy Greek or Roman home. As the marine incrustations indicate, this statuette spent a long period of time submerged in the sea. The unmarred left side of the sculpture was probably buried in the sand and was thus protected.”
All this activity, from “Operation Eclipse” forward, marks a new era in Greece. Following the successes of the Italians in recovering so much material by targeting the middlemen, the collectors, and the museums—rather than the tomb robbers themselves—the Greeks are now employing a similar strategy. And, because of the proven depredations of the museums in Baghdad and Kabul, following the armed conflicts, there is a new attitude among many Greeks—as among many other nations—toward their own heritage and the damage the illicit market is inflicting.