COPENHAGEN: A bronze head of Emperor Septimius Severus on display at a Copenhagen museum has become a bone of contention between the Danish museum and Turkiye, which claims it was looted during an archaeological dig in the 1960s and wants it back.

After decades in the United States as part of a private collection that loaned it to New York’s Metropolitan Museum, a statue of the Roman emperor, who lived from AD 145 to 211, was recently sent back to Turkiye — minus the head. The statue was believed to have been stolen from a site in Turkiye.

Turkish authorities say the missing head is in the Danish capital — where it has been on display at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen for over 50 years. But many Danish experts say they are not so sure.

“We are not convinced that the two things belong together. The documentation is at the moment not very strong, we have to compare breaks of the torso and the head,” Glyptotek’s director of collections Rune Frederiksen said.

In 1979, a former museum curator estimated that the head — acquired in 1970 without any information about its exact origins — corresponded to a decapitated statue from a private American collection. The two bronze parts were even reunited for an exhibition.

“The head was fitted to the torso in the sense that a pole was put into the neck of the head and fitted into the

torso so that the two fragments approached each other,” Frederiksen explained. But in his view, the assembly did not conclusively prove they were meant to be together.

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2023