Gold Funerary Wreath

Object or Group Name

Case Summary

The story of the Getty's acquisition of this ancient gold funerary wreath - which had likely once graced the head of Macedonia royalty - provides a rare look inside the shadowy trade of looted antiquities.

The Getty bought the gold wreath from the Swiss dealer Christoph Leon for USD $1,15 million in 1993. Leon had guaranteed that it came from a private Swiss collection.

But police investigations in Germany and Greece determined that Leon had in fact acted as an intermediary for a Yugoslav smuggler and two Greek looters who had shopped the wreath around Europe in a cardboard box.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Marion True (then antiquities curator of the Getty) was first offered the funerary wreath in 1992 by someone who identified himself as Dr. Preis, a man she had never heard of who was asking $1.6 million for it. Two months later, Preis sent True a cable saying Leon, a dealer she knew in Basel, would act as a middleman in negotiations. Preis then arranged to show True the golden wreath in a bank vault in Zurich.

What transpired at that Zurich meeting isn't clear, but it clearly upset True. In a letter to the curator, Leon apologized for the "disaster" and the "misbehavior" of the two men who met her at the bank. True replied that "whoever was impersonating Dr. Preis" had done "tremendous damage to a great object."

"I hope you will find a possible buyer for it," True wrote, "but I am afraid that in our case it is something that is too dangerous for us to be involved with."

Six months later, however, True went ahead with the deal, ignoring warnings from Greek authorities that it had likely been looted. When the Getty paid for the wreath, it forwarded funds to a Swiss bank account controlled by Leon and his Greek and Yugoslav partners, records show.

The Greek Ministry of Culture requested the return of the gold funerary wreath in 1996, and formally resubmitted its claim again in May 2004. The ministry presented archaeological evidence establishing that three artifacts the Getty acquired in 1993 (the wreath, a tombstone and a torso of a young woman, or kore) were all of Greek origin.

Further, a Polaroid of the wreath taken soon after it was looted was found in the archives of Italian dealer Gianfranco Becchina, sent from an address in Thessaloniki. It is believed that the Greek looter of the object had offered it to Becchina before it was smuggled out of the country.

On December 11, 2006, Greece and the Getty reached an agreement for the return of the wreath and the kore.