Epikratis’ tombstone was repatriated from Britain – Photos

A pedimented tombstone made of white fine-grained Pentelic marble, engraved with the name ‘Epikratis’, which was repatriated to our country very recently, was presented today in the Epigraphic Museum, where it will remain. The Minister of Culture and Sports, Lina Mendoni, Vassiliki Papageorgiou, head of the Antiquities and Cultural Heritage Directorate and Themos Athanasios, director of the Epigraphic Museum, attended and spoke at the presentation event.

“In the Christie’s online auction catalog scheduled for 8/12/21, one year ago, a marble inscribed column of the 4th c. BC. The column, measuring 87.5 X 37 cm, ends in a triangular pediment. Her body depicts a bathing vessel with a relief depiction of a seated female figure and a male figure. Between the bath and the epitaph engraved inscription ‘Epikratis’. Starting price at auction 60,000 – 80,000 pounds. During the control of this auction by the competent department of the Directorate of Documentation and Protection of Cultural Property, in the context of the regular purchase controls it carries out, archaeologists from the department identified the column that was characterized as ‘suspicious’. This was followed by a check of the object based on all the available information from the files kept and updated daily by the management. The conclusion was that the tombstone in question was – and this could be proven beyond any doubt with strong evidence – the product of illegal trafficking from Greek territory.” With these words, Vasiliki Papageorgiou, head of the Directorate of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, began her speech in which she referred in detail to the actions of the competent Directorate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the repatriation of the specific monument. As she reported, after a check, it was found that the tombstone of the auction was a product of illegal trafficking, “as it is identical to an object that appears in three photographs directly connected to antiquarian activity, from a confiscated photographic archive (Bekina archive) in her possession Service since 2006. However, the most important element, decisive for its assertion with claims, was the fact that the inscribed tombstone is included in the list of movable monuments for which, based on the 2017 Decision of the Fourth Five-Member Court of Appeal of Athens, which was made irrevocable in 2020, the antiquities dealer G.B. has been declared guilty, because he illegally appropriated them”.

Thanking V. Papageorgiou herself, as well as the executives of the Cultural Property Documentation department “for the work they do by systematically and daily monitoring every move that can be made abroad and concerning Greek antiquities”, L. Mendoni noted : “Each ancient which is illegally located outside the Greek borders is a separate case, which must be examined with the data available to the services. In this particular case the column, because there was documentary material, was able to return in exactly one year. This is not the case for other claims, which often do not have a happy ending, precisely because there are not all those elements that would document the origin and the illegal act as such”, explained the minister, who expressed her “joy” for the return of the stele to Attic land.

“We don’t know where it comes from, but we know from its form, its letters, the quality of the sculpture that it comes from Attic land. That is why it will stay in the Epigraphic Museum, it will not go to one of the regional museums – something that would happen if we could identify that it is from the alpha or the deina region of Attica”, added L. Mendoni. He also emphasized the “multi-month, often multi-year” effort that is made in some cases, without, however, “the result being the same positive, because there is an inability to document the spatio-temporal detail of when and from where any artefact was stolen. Here we are very lucky because the specific column and its photos were in a specific file owned by the YPPOA and thus it reached the identification and finally the return within a single year”, underlined L. Mendoni.

“Today is a day of joy for the Epigraphic Museum, because a monument that comes from the Attic land is coming back and any ancient one of ours is coming back, it is very important, as it shows the activation of the Ministry of Culture and its services in claiming antiquities and effort to return them. The Epigraphic Museum has once again recovered inscribed monuments, which we are trying to return. In fact, it is among our goals in the future to have a list of the ancient Greek inscriptions found in foreign museums”, said Ath. Themos.

The pedimented tombstone, the work of an Attic workshop of the 4th c. BC,, is made of white fine-grained Pentelite marble. It is 88 cm high, 37-35 cm wide and 10 cm thick. It is crowned by a free triangular pediment that once bore a painted floral decoration. A horizontal written band also demarcated the rule of the pediment at the base of the epitaph. The transition from the crown to the body of the column is achieved with an Ionic wave, which was also painted.

On its body, a relief bath-amphora dominates within a rectangular partition, the handles of which are completed outside the partition of the representation. The details of the handles would also be rendered in color. Above the vase, in the upper part of the body of the column and in the middle of its width, the name of the deceased is engraved: Epikratis. Between the letters there are traces of letters of an older inscription, which was scraped off to facilitate the reuse of the monument.

On the belly of the vessel two figures are depicted in low relief in the gesture of reception typical of funerary iconography. They both step on a shallowly carved ground line. The woman seated in a reclining position to the left of the scene shakes hands with a young barren robed man standing in front of her. The man should, according to the inscription, be identified with the dead Epikratis.

RES-EMP

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