After nine years in limbo, treasures from Crimea return to Ukraine

Hundreds of ancient artifacts from Crimea that were stored in a Dutch museum for nine years while Russia and Ukraine fought a legal battle over their ownership are now back in Ukraine, officials in Amsterdam said Monday.

The works arrived Sunday at the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine in Kiev, said officials at the Allard Pierson Museum, an archaeological museum at the University of Amsterdam, which in 2014 borrowed about 400 works from four Crimean museums for the exhibition “The Crimea: Gold and Secrets of the Black Sea.” The artifacts include gold jewelry, gold plates, precious gemstones, Greek and Roman stone ornaments, and ceramics.

A month after the show began, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, and when it came time to return the objects, a legal conflict arose: should they go back to the Crimean museums, now under Russian state control, or to Ukraine, which argued that the works were part of the national heritage?

The nine-year battle for the treasures became a kind of proxy war for national sovereignty and cultural property. Els van der Plas, director of the Allard Pierson Museum, said in a statement that it was “a special case in which cultural heritage fell victim to geopolitical developments.”

Rostyslav Karandjev, Minister of Culture of Ukraine, announced the return of the objects last Tuesday in a statement on a government website, expressing gratitude to the museum for storing it while the dispute continued.

But the University of Amsterdam refused to confirm the Ukrainian announcement last week. Yasha Lange, spokesperson for the university, said on Monday that the university had remained quiet because the gold was still in transit. Now that it was safe in Kiev, he said: “We are pleased that these objects have now been returned to their legitimate owners.”

Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea was President Vladimir V. Putin’s first major incursion into Ukrainian territory, a move that the United Nations said it was illegal and that the European Union has strongly condemned this. Russia escalated its attack on Ukraine in February 2022 with a full-scale invasion the destruction of cultural sites and looting artifacts from Ukrainian museums.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture had argued that the treasures should be transferred from Crimea to Kiev because at the time of the exhibition they were the property of Ukraine and were in danger of being seized by Russia if returned to Crimea.

The four lending museums – the Central Museum of Tavrida, the Historical and Cultural Domain of Kerch, the Bakhchisaray Historical and Cultural State Reserve of the Republic of Crimea and the National Domain of Tauric Chersonesos – argued that the objects should be returned to them on the basis of the loan agreements.

At a news conference on Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry S. Peskov reaffirmed Russia’s long-standing position that the collection should return to those museums. “It belongs to Crimea and should be there,” he told reporters at a news conference, according to Interfax, a Russian news agency.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine praised the Dutch Supreme Court’s ruling in June: writing on X, formerly Twitter, that the collection “cannot be returned to Crimea for obvious reasons – it cannot be given to the occupier, the robber.” He promised to return the works to their place of origin at a future date, hoping that Ukraine would reclaim the territory. “Of course it will be in Crimea,” he said, “when the Ukrainian flag will be in Crimea.”

Because of the fragility and value of the items — about $1.5 million, according to court documents — preparations for their return took several months, Mr. Lange said. The Allard Pierson Museum had agreed not to charge Ukraine for storage costs for nine years while the treasures were kept in the basement, including costs for security and climate control, he said, adding that Ukraine had covered some of the moving costs.

“Ultimately we felt it was the right thing to do,” Mr. Lange said. “No one wanted this to be the situation.”

Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting from Tbilisi, Georgia.