Santa Claus lives by the beach

(hispic cafe)

If you grew up in a northern European cultural environment, Santa Claus definitely lives in a cold climate. Reindeer, fur suit, snow, sleigh, Coca Cola, et cetera. Something like the picture above. (Which was taken in July, in Japan, of course.)

So being confronted with the historical St. Nicholas is a bit bizarre. He was the bishop of Myra, today's Demre on Turkey's southern coast. Demre's a flat fairly unexciting agricultural town, one of those places you pass through on the way to somewhere else. But it does have a central attraction: the church of St. Nicholas (and his original burial spot), which got 395,000 visitors in 2009 according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Jenny and I stopped by last month on our way to somewhere with more beach and better scenery.

The church is mostly obscured by this hideous roof, presumably built for 'conservation' purposes.

The choir and altar.

There's been some controversy about the site lately. The Turkish government changed the name of the site from "St. Nicholas Church" to "Father Christmas Museum" (Noel Baba Müzesi) last year, in what some people see as a stab at Christianity. The new name is certainly stupid because what you see is a semi-ruined medieval church with some nice Byzantine frescos. No reindeer, fir trees, or jolly fat men with beards.

The new name of the church made me expect a nonstop Santa Claus kitsch explosion, but there is in fact a totally different kind of kitsch - a long chain of Russian icon shops! St. Nicholas is actively venerated year-round by devout Russian orthodox, and there were indeed women praying at the statue near the entrance to the Church.

A visitor prays to St. Nick.

 

Shops packed with icons and other goodies oriented to the Russian market.

There's also a statue of St. Nick set up by the Antalya Santa Claus foundation celebrating the "International Santa Claus Activities" of 1998. Sounds weird but I'm sure it was fun for the international crowd of youth participants. Am kinda curious what they did! 

This brings us to a less-known story about the Turkish med coast: it's now dominated by Russian tourists, who are famous for wandering around archaeological sites in absurdly scanty bikinis (yes, the men too) and sometimes high heels. It's amusing that Russia should finally get the warm water port the czars dreamed of for centuries - but in the form of Antalya's endless holiday villages.

St. Nicholas is no longer buried in Demre. Some sneaky Italians stole his bones in an undercover operation in 1087 and brought them to Bari, from where they may or may not have been stolen and brought to England, Germany, or Venice. Last Christmas Nezdat Çevik of Akdeniz University, who excavates at Demre, and Antalya Museum director Cumali Ayabakan teamed up to request repatriation of "Santa's Bones" from Bari:

Çevik reiterated St. Nicholas’s remarks in which he said, “I was born here, raised here and I will be buried here.” The professor added that “we should respect the wish of St. Nicholas. The bones should be brought back to his grave in Demre.”

Çevik has also urged state authorities to take steps to contact their Italian counterparts. “The ministries should work to move the bones back to Turkey.” The scholar also emphasized the significance of St. Nicholas’s grave in terms of tourism and said that the number of tourists visiting the church in Demre will drastically increase when the bones are returned.

It's interesting that here, repatriation is not tied to sentimental concerns about colonialism or the spirits of the ancestors, but rather to the chance to generate cash from tourists. As repatriation becomes more mainstream, it also seems to be attracting preposterous proposals like this.

Recently the Koç Foundation - run by Turkey's richest industrialist family - has taken over some aspects of site management at the church. Judging by this sign, the former funders - the World Monuments Fund and the Samuel H. Kress foundation - have suffered a damnatio memoriae. I'm dying to know the back story on this one.

WMF WTF?

The Cairo Conference, One Month Later

The Conference on International Cooperation in the Restitution and Protection of Cultural Heritage took place on April 7 and 8, 2010 in Cairo. Over 20 countries from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean attended. This meeting, the first of its kind, brought together countries that have been victimized by the antiquities trade to talk about return and restitution. As I observed in January, this meeting represents a new phase in the decolonization of heritage.

New Tang Dynasty Television reported on the conference, including an interview with the Syrian delegation. As the clip from Hawass suggests, one of the main aims of the meeting was to further increase the pressure on European and American museums to stop purchasing illegal antiquities.


Two days, of course, was not enough time for the participants to agree on a common platform (though seven countries added items to a repatriation wish list). As Paul Barford notes, it is unclear exactly what will come of the conference, though it is clearly a historic step. Zahi Hawass would like to make the meetings an annual event, and the next one is tentatively scheduled for Greece next year.

Last week Kwame Opuku published an assessment of the conference at museum-security.org, which is worth reading in its entirety (via SAFE). It is refreshing to read Opuku's in-depth discussion of colonial looting from African nations, which is often neglected in the Western press. I was especially struck by his roadmap toward a permanent organization that would advocate for the return of illicit antiquities:

What the Conference needs to do rapidly, is to establish a Secretariat or some other body that would have, inter alia, the following functions:

1. Follow up implementation of decisions of the Conference;
2. Collect materials relevant to restitution, such as UNESCO, UN and ICOM resolutions, decisions and other documents and bring to the attention of States concerned;
3. Assist members of the Conference in the formulation of restitution demands; This is to avoid giving opportunity to holders of looted artefacts saying there has been no demand for restitution. Incredible as it may sound, we still find officials of the British Museum saying there has been no demand for the return of the Rosetta Stone by Egypt. Germans are also saying there has been no demand by Egypt for the return of the bust of Nefertiti even though a German delegation, including the Director of the Neues Museum, Berlin, went recently to Cairo to present what they consider as proof that the bust of Nefertiti was legally removed from Egypt. No doubt much of this is propaganda for internal consumption. The British Museum also pretends there has been no demand for the return of the Benin Bronzes even though a petition was presented by a member of the Benin Royal in the British House of Parliament as shown by the records of the House;
4. Maintain an internet site where issues of restitution and relevant materials can be made available to the public;
5. Publish articles and other materials relevant to the objectives of the Conference;
6. Publish the complete records of the Conference proceedings. No where can one find a complete record of this first conference, not even at the homepage of Zahi Hawass, a consummate master of the mass media. Moreover, the homepage of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities seems not to have been updated for a long time.

Something along these lines is clearly needed if the conference participants are to achieve their goals.

More coverage of the conference from Looting Matters here, here, and here.

Hawass Demands Frescos, French Surrender: A Preview of Archaeology in the 2010s

To ring in the new year, a story that hints of things to come in global archaeology, and some prognostications and aspirations for the coming decade.

First to Egypt, where Zahi Hawass has been generating a lot of news in recent months. Fresh off of the Louvre’s return of mosaic fragments stolen from the tomb of Tetaki the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) will formally demand the return of the bust of Nefertiti, the Rosetta Stone, the Dendera Zodiac, and other iconic artifacts in European museums.

Hawass: praying for a return? (AFP)

The storyline has been playing out all year. Back in January 2009, German archaeologists informed the SCA that the mosaic fragments in the Louvre were looted, and Egypt promptly demanded their return. Early in October, Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni lost a close election for UNESCO Director-General, partly due to the opposition of France. A few days later, on October 7, Egypt gave the Louvre notice that they would not be getting excavation permits for their long-time dig at Saqqara if they did not return the fresco fragments. Though the Louvre management initially met the demand with defiance, it took them only a day and a half to cave. On October 9, the museum agreed to return the fragments to Egypt.

December 14, French President Nicolas Sarkozy formally presented the fragments to Egyptian Prime Minister Hosni Mubarak during his state visit to Paris. (No word on whether cheese was eaten during the surrender.) Egypt exacts a satisfying revenge for its loss at UNESCO, and strikes a blow for the cause of repatriation.


This fine product courtesy of Bob McCarty.

As the press noted in October, the return of the Tetaki frescos was part of Hawass’ larger repatriation vision, which includes both recently looted material and certain iconic artifacts, like the Rosetta Stone and the famous bust of Nefertiti in Berlin, that he believes were removed from Egypt illegally.

While Hawass has been on this topic for years, he apparently has recently changed tactics. After requests for loans of the iconic artifacts were rebuffed by the British Museum and the Neues Museum, he has decided to put his foot down, in typically amusing fashion:

"What angers me is that for decade after decade the museums of the world have treated Egypt like a buffalo, exploiting our generosity by asking to borrow our artefacts for their various exhibitions and we have complied, handing things over for free,'' he said.

''But now the buffalo is thirsty*, and needs attention, but no one cares to help. Well, we have had enough of this. No more. I will not tolerate this kind of treatment any longer.''

This is how Egypt has been treated. Needs a drink now. (Jiri Bohdal)

Next March, Hawass will convene a conference on the return of stolen antiquities which will include up to a dozen states including Italy, Greece, China, and Mexico. Details of the agenda are unclear – I wonder if we’ll see a permanent organization of source states to advocate for repatriation of looted materials? The fact that these countries are major research destinations for American and European archaeologists adds a certain frisson to the proceedings. The possibility of connecting research permits to repatriation is a cloud looming over the heads of the archaeological establishment in the global North.

My guess for the next decade: such meetings are the shape of things to come. While the case for return of the Tetaki frescos was open and shut, Hawass parlayed it into a major symbolic victory for repatriation more generally. Anyone with a brain can see now that the way to get European museums to return artifacts is to threaten their excavation permits. Foreigners wanting to dig abroad are going to face higher and higher hurdles in the coming years. It’s happening already : Turkey this year circulated a letter requiring foreign expeditions to have a Turkish joint director; Saudi Arabia is becoming more active in demanding repatriation and in threatening permits to do so.

Is this good or bad? I don’t know. Things will be different. I know people will moan and groan about Hawass, and how his attitude is nationalistic, will harm archaeological research, damage international ties, and so on. Of course, these are partly true, and it is totally unfair that archaeologists will be the ones to suffer because of the intransigence of their respective states over repatriation. But these complaints miss the point. The struggle for control of artifacts and sites has nothing to do with archaeological research. Instead, what we are seeing is a process of decolonization of heritage, and like other decolonizations it is likely to get messy.

The justifications for European appropriation of other nations’ antiquities hinged on two arguments. First, that ‘natives’ were unable to appreciate the treasures they had. This argument is a piece of the racist rhetoric of colonialism: the savages were willfully ignorant, refuse to learn, and so were unworthy of self-rule. These tired tropes continue to be trotted out to justify European museums' retention of major artifacts. But when did the colonial powers ever bother to do mass education about why archaeology was important? For that matter, how often do archaeologists do any local education, even today? There are many sites that have been active for decades where the excavators have never given a public lecture to people that live nearby. Yet it remains common to blame "locals" for not understanding the obscure academic pursuits of an alien culture: it becomes a moral failing that demonstrates their inferiority.

The second common argument is that objects like the Rosetta Stone or the Elgin Marbles needed to be taken to Europe for ‘safekeeping’ lest they be destroyed. There is, of course, a certain truth to this. But once taken, the objects became symbols of European appropriation of other peoples' pasts, just one more indignity heaped on top of the appropriation of the present by the colonial powers. The condescension that Egyptians and others are untrustworthy and unfit to control their own heritage continues, and this is obviously one of the things that bugs Hawass the most. As he reflected after the British Museum rejected his request for a loan of the Rosetta Stone:

Even some people in the press began to say: 'If the British Museum will give the Rosetta Stone to Egypt, maybe Egyptians will not return it back.' We are not the Pirates of the Caribbean. We are a civilised country. If I...sign a contract with the British Museum, (we) will return it. Therefore we decided not to host the Rosetta Stone, but to ask for the Rosetta Stone to come back for good to Egypt.

What Hawass wants is for Egypt to be treated as a "civilized country" rather than a child in need of tutelage. It is not a coincidence, then, that he is looking for the return of iconic artifacts in particular - the ones that symbolize colonial rule and foreign control over Egypt’s past. No one would seriously argue that these artifacts would be in European museums if Egypt had never been invaded and occupied by the French and British. Likewise, there is no academic merit to the objects being in one place rather than the other (except, of course, that Americans and Europeans find London much more convenient than Cairo). Like many of Hawass' activities, these requests are political theater, not scientific pursuits. But like all good theater, it is about something very real: the sense of many people around the world that their past is being held hostage by foreigners, whether archaeologists, museums, or collectors.

So then: we close out the decade with hints of a harder line by source countries on repatriation, as a prelude to the decolonization of archaeological practice. My prediction is that the new decade will see the emergence in archaeology of a multipolar order that replaces the Euro-American superpowers.

I would also like to believe that this will be the decade where abolish the idea of culture as property, a stupid legacy of the colonial centuries that feeds the ego of collectors but does nothing to help people learn from the past. If an object really does belong to the world, as the British Museum and other institutions often argue, how can it be owned by a single museum, whatever its pretentions to being a "world repository"? The desire for ownership is a disease that reinforces power inequalities and sustains the mystification of the general public. Here's hoping that the 2010s bring a global system of artifact loans that exhibit some of the great treasures in places they've never been seen before, especially in the global South.

*Sadly, no relationship is implied to the bar of similar name, which serves cheeseburger soup. Mmmm.

Geronimo's Skull

The New York Times reported on February 19 that descendents of Apache leader Geronimo (Goyathlay) filed suit in Federal court against Skull and Bones, demanding the return of his skull on the 100th anniversary of his death. Rumor has long held that the Yale secret society holds Geronimo’s skull and uses it in the quasi-occult rituals held in its clubhouse, called the Tomb. Allegedly, the bones were looted from Geronimo’s grave at Fort Sill, Oklahoma around 1918 by Prescott Bush (the father of George H.W. Bush and grandfather of W). This seems to be confirmed by a letter discovered in 2005, which describes the skull in New Haven as having been excavated in Fort Sill, along with two bones and some horse tack.

The case seems fairly cut-and-dried. Lineal descendants of a great Native American leader want his stolen remains returned from an odious, elitist occult society that produced such wretched specimens as George Bush and John Kerry. Hard to imagine anyone having a problem with that.

However! The complaint, filed by former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, also names President Obama and Defense Secretary Gates, and asks not only for whatever bones may be in New Haven, but for the exhumation of Geronimo’s grave at Fort Sill and the reburial of his remains in the Gila Wilderness. This request raises the specter of intratribal politics. Jeff Houser, Chairman of the Fort Sill Apache Tribe, insists that the grave be left where it is, whether or not the body is complete.

So, who does Geronimo really belong to? The descendants? The Apache generally? To Native Americans? To the place where he died? To the United States as a whole? All of these groups have a claim in one way or another, and the sensationalism around Skull and Bones is a distraction from the real question.

The appearance of Ramsey Clark as attorney for the plaintiffs flags this case with a political agenda that extends beyond a simple family affair. Clark, leader of a cult-like Communist group and an enthusiastic apologist for characters like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, doesn’t do anything these days unless he thinks it contributes to anti-imperialism and world revolution. Implicit in his role, and in the tenor of the complaint, is a desire to secure justice not only for the descendants of Goyathlay, but for the oppressed people of the world more generally.

Supporters of the cause certainly draw this connection (along with many others). A petition circulating online demands the return of the skull and decries Skull and Bones as an organization full of “satanic theatricism and latent homosexuality”, “elitist, racist witchcraft”, and connections to Nazism and the Bavarian Illuminati. Many of the almost 9,000 signatories point out how the case is symbolic to them of larger historical injustices against Native peoples.

One frustrating thing about the case is the lack of hard evidence. Skull and Bones, of course, neither confirm nor deny. Some historians insist that Geronimo’s grave was not robbed in 1918, and no one has exhumed the body to see. It seems likely that Prescott Bush dug up a grave at Fort Sill, but there is no proof it was Geronimo’s. Inclusion of Skull and Bones in the demand for repatriation is solely based on hearsay.

But like most archaeological controversies in the news, whatever empirical truths might lie behind the case have very little to do with how the public understands the issue. The story is the compelling thing. The elitist white secret society practicing occult rituals with the bones of a great Native leader? This is a metaphor that precisely captures very real historical truths. Secretive, cynical, exploitative, obsessed with death: this has been indigenous peoples’ experience with whites for 500 years and more. People much like the Bonesmen were the ringleaders in the genocide of Native Americans. The story is true in some fundamental sense, regardless of the empirical facts of the case.

So, what role for the archaeologist here? A decent excavation at Fort Sill could resolve the question of whether the grave was robbed in the first place, but this is a technical process, which could only happen after the political questions behind the case were resolved. What is missing here, as in many archaeological stories that come into the news, is a role for the scholar of the past in telling a story that captures the contemporary imagination. To command the public eye, archaeologists and historians need to find ways of giving our stories about the past a moral dimension and a kind of poetry that goes past the simply empirical.

Cai Mingchao: Civil Disobedience at Christie's

Today’s news from the antiquities trade involves a fashion designer, the Opium Wars, Jackie Chan, political blackmail, and a creative act of civil disobedience. The biggest private art auction in world history concluded in Paris at Christie’s last Wednesday, as the collection of fashion designers Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé sold for $484.6 million (the catalogue alone ran 1,800 pages).

The biggest stir was caused by an anonymous telephone bidder who purchased two Qing dynasty bronze fountainheads for $20 million each. The heads were among a dozen looted in October 1860 by from Beijing’s Old Summer Palace by Anglo-French troops during the Second Opium War. The palace was stripped of artwork prior to its destruction on the orders of Lord Elgin, then British High Commissioner to China. (And, ironically, son of the Elgin of Parthenon Marbles fame). Since the Christie’s sale was announced, the Chinese government has been demanding the return of the bronzes as stolen property. Actor Jackie Chan was quoted in the Times Online as saying “They remain looted items, no matter whom they were sold to. Whoever took it out [of China] is himself a thief. It was looting yesterday. It is still looting today.”

Cai Mingchao reads his statement (Photo Brothersoft).

The mystery bidder was revealed today as Cai Mingchao, a Shanghai collector and dealer and consultant for China’s National Treasure Fund, a government organization which purchases looted and stolen relics on behalf of the state. There was, however, a catch: Cai declared that he has no intention of paying for the heads, and that he placed the bid in order to sabotage the auction. He excused his action as an act of patriotic civil disobedience: "every Chinese would have done the same as I did. It's just that I got the opportunity. I have fulfilled my duty." He also noted that because the Chinese government had deemed the sale illegal, he would not have been able to take delivery of the heads within China anyhow.

While it is unclear whether Cai’s scuttling of the auction was in any way sanctioned by the Chinese government, it fits with the tenor of its recent statements. The French decision to allow sale of the bronzes caused “serious damage to Chinese people's cultural rights, interests and national sentiments,” according to the China State Administration of Cultural Heritage.

On the surface, it is easy to admire Cai Mingchao for risking his reputation as a dealer and collector in pursuit of historical justice. Among the more repulsive episodes in European colonialism, the Opium Wars were fought to defend unregulated narco-trafficking in China by government-sponsored British and French cartels. Beijing’s Summer Palace was looted and burned as a gesture of revenge, and Chinese still smart from the humiliation.

I am generally sympathetic toward repatriation demands. I also see how useful civil disobedience at auctions could be as a strategy for derailing the sale of obviously looted antiquities. (I have heard of other examples, which I will track down for a different post.) Some further context, however, makes the story a little murkier. Of the original twelve heads, five are missing and five are back in China, making the two YSL heads the only two left on the market. While they are interesting and significant as artifacts, they are not particularly ancient. Nor they even particularly important compared to other looted Chinese treasures floating around the antiquities market. And China already owns most of the extant pieces! I suspect the government has chosen to pursue these particular artifacts in order to whip up nationalist and anti-colonialist sentiment both at home and to sympathetic audiences abroad.

The play of meaning around these artifacts is fascinating. While they were clearly collected by Bergé and Saint Laurent as pure objets d’art, no one involved in the auction pretends that they are only that. Cai and the Chinese government have made them into patriotic symbols, while Bergé used them to snub China with a facile statement about human rights. According to the Daily Telegraph, Bergé offered to give China the heads in return for human rights concessions:

"I acquired them and I am completely protected by the law, so what the Chinese are saying is a bit ridiculous," he said. "But I am prepared to offer this bronze head to the Chinese straight away.

“All they have to do is to declare they are going to apply human rights, give the Tibetans back their freedom and agree to accept the Dalai Lama on their territory.

"If they do that, I would be very happy to go myself and bring these two Chinese heads to put them in the Summer Palace in Beijing. It's obviously blackmail but I accept that."

The amount of real charity behind this “offer” is, of course, nil. As Bergé surely knows, this particular piece of “obvious blackmail” had a 100% chance of strongly offending the Chinese government and zero chance of success. His gesture has the odor of colonialist smugness: the uppity natives might be allowed to have their baubles back if they meet the rational demands of the white man. But of course they won’t because, after all, they’re not very civilized, now are they, old chap?

It is important, however, that Bergé acknowledges, in principle, that the heads are not simply art objects. Dealers in stolen antiquities often insist that the value of the objects is truly to be found in their inner aesthetic aura, so that their lack of provenance (and the destroyed archaeological sites the looters leave behind), are unimportant. This case exposes a revealing chink in the armor of that argument.

Link roundup:

Portfolio on the auction
Portfolio on Cai's announcement
The story in the Times Online
Danwei on Cai
The Daily Telegraph on Bergé's "offer"
Some AP photos of the bronzes