Elmali Hoard

Elmali Hoard

In 1984, looters unearthed a collection of nearly two thousand ancient Greek and Lycian silver coins in Elmali, a town near Antalya (Türkiye), and soon after smuggled them out of Türkiye. Turkish authorities learned of the discovery and contacted Interpol seeking international assistance to find and arrest the traffickers.

Looters allegedly sold the coins to a middleman, who sold them to a Munich dealer for USD $1,325,000. A consortium calling itself OKS Partners purchased almost 1,700 of these coins for approximately USD $3,200,000. The consortium was comprised of an American businessman William Koch, New York investment banker Jonathan H. Kagan, and an academic, Jeffrey Spier, then based in London. (Years later, Spier was named antiquities curator at the Getty Museum.)

OKS began selling select coins from the hoard in 1987 and planned to sell 10 more in 1988 through the Numismatic Fine Arts gallery, owned by the Beverly Hills antiquities dealer Bruce McNall.

Turkish journalists Özgen Acar and Melik Kaylan revealed the illicit origins of the hoard in the July 1988 issue of Connoisseur Magazine. Türkiye's lawyers halted the sale, and McNall returned the coins to the country.

In 1989, Türkiye filed suit against OKS partners for the return of the coins. The case ended a decade later with an out-of-court settlement and the return of the hoard to Türkiye in 1999.

1700

Currency – coins, weights, exchange goods

Greek

Lycian

Türkiye

Leonid Eremeychuk

Collin Dworak

Vanessa Rousseau; Damien Huffer