A deal between Turkey and the United States to combat illegal trafficking in antiquities and other cultural property has divided historians and cultural preservationists over whether the pact will curb smuggling or damage the cultural heritage of ethnic minorities that are ignored or worse.
The memorandum of understanding signed last month imposes U.S. import restrictions on archaeological artifacts older than 250 years that the Turkish government does not allow to leave the country. Its purpose is to “reduce incentives for the looting of irreplaceable archaeological and ethnographic materials representative of Turkey’s cultural heritage,” according to the agreement, which will become binding once the two governments notify each other that the implementation procedures are ready.
The United States is thought to be the second-largest destination for illegally acquired antiquities after Europe. The criminal industry is estimated to be worth as much as $6 billion, though hard figures are scarce. The US State Department has bilateral agreements with a number of countries to thwart the trade and enforce a 1970 UNESCO treaty to which both Turkey and the US are parties.
“for [Unesco] “A memorandum of understanding is necessary for this treaty to have domestic effect under U.S. law,” said Tess Davis, executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, which supported the agreement. “U.S. import restrictions could deal a major blow to the global black market in looted Turkish antiquities.”
The agreement was made in response to “large-scale looting” that has taken place in Turkey over the past decade or so, said Omur Harmanca, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who directs an archaeological survey project in central Turkey and wrote a letter in support of the memorandum. “The only way to stop this is to limit the circulation of antiquities and shrink the antiquities market, and that’s what this agreement is about.”
The agreement also expands cultural exchange between the two countries, and Harmanca said it could facilitate traveling exhibitions and long-term loans between U.S. and Turkish museums. Observers said the pact could also ease challenges for U.S. archaeologists who face bureaucratic hurdles in leading excavations.
The new rules don’t apply to thousands of objects
The new rules will not apply retroactively to the tens of thousands of artworks Turkey is seeking to return, some of which are in Western collectors and museums, but they will prevent costly legal disputes in the future, Turkish Culture Minister Nuri Aksoy said at the signing ceremony on January 19.
Turkey is dotted with the ruins of countless civilizations, from Neolithic temples to Roman amphitheaters, medieval cathedrals and Ottoman mosques. Critics accuse the Islamist-rooted government of prioritizing certain eras and cultures, motivated by tourism dollars and nationalist policies. While Turkey’s Hellenistic sites and artifacts attract millions of tourists each year, its Byzantine and Armenian heritage is often neglected or suffers from substandard restoration work.
While the memorandum makes no mention of immovable cultural property, opponents of the memorandum, such as Armenian-American and Greek-American lobbying groups that promote the rights of Turkey’s dwindling communities, say mismanagement of World Heritage sites in recent years points to a checkered record of protecting minority cultures. Other critics, including the World Heritage Alliance and the Association of Museum Directors (AAMD), argue that Turkey has failed to meet the agreement’s prerequisites by failing to protect cultural heritage.
Turkey “is taking active steps to eradicate some of the country’s most important heritage, in particular the culture and religion of ethnic minorities, through state-sanctioned destruction of cultural heritage,” the AAMD said in a letter opposing the agreement last year, and criticized the designation of restricted materials as being too broad.
Turkey last summer restored the 6th-century Hagia Sophia and a medieval chora as mosques, despite protests from UNESCO and Western governments that said the works would diminish their universal value. The old town of Diyabakir, a Kurdish-majority city, was devastated in 2015 during a Turkish military operation against rebels that began within weeks of the site’s World Heritage status.
Harmanca of the University of Illinois warns that removing property from non-Muslim holdings would deprive archaeologists and historians of the context they need for their research. “Any kind of trafficking of artifacts is a very questionable ethical and political position to support,” he said. If anything, he thinks the memorandum will make Turkey more committed to protecting all cultural heritage.
The MOU is a “powerful tool” to persuade Turkey to comply with international standards for protecting endangered cultural heritage, says Davis of the Antiquities Coalition. “Defenders of minority cultural heritage in Turkey should see this MOU not as an obstacle, but as a stepping stone to further their important work. It gives them a mechanism to make their voices heard and achieve much-needed change.”
Accusations of “artwashing”
Yet the history of Armenians as victims of the Ottoman Turks’ genocide during World War I is especially bitter in a country that still denies that the killings amounted to genocide. The erasure of Armenian culture continues to this day: In recent weeks, a church has been put up for sale and another has been bulldozed.
Hegnar Watenpau, a professor of art and architecture at the University of California, Davis, worries the deal is a form of “artwashing” to deflect attention from the harm that Turkish cultural policies have done to sites like Ani, the former capital of the Armenian kingdom, where, despite being a World Heritage Site, work to rescue its crumbling medieval buildings and defaced church artworks has proceeded very slowly.
Watenpaugh’s 2019 book, “The Missing Pages,” chronicles how parts of a 13th-century illuminated manuscript ended up at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Armenian Church’s efforts to recover it. The Zeytun Gospels only survive today because they were smuggled out of Turkey during the genocide a century ago.
“If this agreement shows that the Turkish government is upholding its international commitments on cultural heritage, then it is to be welcomed,” she said, “but we still have to ask questions about diversity. [of heritage] “The inability of a nation to utter the words ‘Armenian’ or ‘Kurdish’ when talking about its culture is a matter of trust, given that it does not acknowledge its past.”
