Weary Herakles: Repatriation in Action – Antalya Museum, Turkey

Being a Benjaminian, I value the aura of seeing the ‘real thing’ as opposed to reproductions. Find the Mona Lisa boring? Not me. Yawn at Van Gogh’s sunflowers because they’re reproduced everywhere? Not likely. I like to get up close, see the brushstrokes or the chisel marks or the other traces of the human hand which created great works of art. Maybe that’s why I spend so much time in museums.

I was excited, therefore, to stumble on one of the repatriation case studies I read about many moons ago while doing my thesis, while at the Antalya Museum. Antalya, for those of you who haven’t had the good fortune to go there (do if you get the chance, it’s great), is a city of about a million people on Turkey’s southern ‘Turquoise Coast’. Possessed of Lycian, Pamphylian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman history among other eras, it has a museum well-stocked with antique sculptures and other collections, and which is handily located by the beach.

This was actually the only museum I went to in Turkey. I think there is something about living with world-class culture at my fingertips which makes me tend towards museum snobbery unless there is something particularly interesting I want to see, and this museum fell into the latter category: nicely displayed statues and interactives, some Bronze Age bits, and mosaics, which I always like. The less interesting numismatic collection and tired ethnographic displays I won’t mention.

But anyway, back to the repatriated statue. As arguments for repatriation go, it’s an interesting one. In the early 1980s, the Boston Museum of a Fine Arts purchased a bust later nicknamed ‘Weary Herakles’ from a German dealer, with provenance that according to their website “has never been verified”. While on loan to the Met in 1990, it was noticed that it bore a striking resemblance to the lower half of a sculpture of Hercules at the Antalya Museum. Claims were put forward, arguments went back and forth, but on the strength of evidence of looting at the site where the lower half was discovered, Perge, an agreement was reached to return the upper half to Turkey in 2011.

Herakles might be weary, but he is now the star of his own little show. Displayed against a dramatic curtain backdrop, the statue is powerful despite the evidence of its previous separation. Videos and supporting texts tell the story of its reunification, and in a museum led by antique sculpture it is certainly a focal point for its history as ‘data carrier’ much more than for its aesthetic qualities or superlative condition.

For me, as well just laying eyes on something I had spent time reading about and considering, it was interesting to see this different treatment of repatriation than what I am used to. Being from New Zealand, my research into repatriation focused a lot on ‘settler societies’ like Australia, the US, Canada and New Zealand where some of the repatriation claims are domestic, and museums negotiate their own responses to source and local communities. In larger Western museums, the response is more defensive, such as the placing of Parthenon sculptures at the pinnacle of the British Museum’s recent exhibition on the Greek body. It is only in source countries like Turkey, or Italy and Greece, that an unadulterated pro-repatriation stance is possible. “Look at me!” Herakles proclaims, “I’m back where I should be, universal museums be damned!” I see a lot more nuance to the argument personally, but I enjoyed meeting him face to face nonetheless.