Greece recovers hundreds of antiquities from art thief

ATHENS

Greece said it has recovered hundreds of looted Neolithic to Byzantine artifacts including a second century bronze statue of Alexander the Great from a notorious British antiquities dealer after a 17-year legal battle.

The fight to repatriate the trove of 351 objects began in 2006 with authorities investigating the eponymous company of Robin Symes in the country and abroad, Greece’s Culture Minister Lina Medoni said in a statement.

The recovery came years after Italian and Swiss police in 2016 recovered a haul of archaeological artefacts stolen from Italy and stored by Symes, a key figure in the illegal antiquities trade with ties to Italian tomb raiders.

The Italian booty was found in a storage unit at the Geneva Freeport but Greece’s culture ministry did not specify if its recovery was linked to the Italian haul.

The extensive collection repatriated to Greece includes notable pieces such as a Neolithic-era statuette carved from white stone, dating back to the 4th millennium B.C.

Other significant finds include an Early Cycladic figurine dating to between 3200 and 2700 B.C, a damaged marble statue of an Archaic kore from 550-500 B.C and an Archaic marble head of either a kore or a sphinx from 550-500 B.C.

Greece has been fighting to repatriate looted artifacts from museums and private collections around the world.

Three fragments of Athens’ Parthenon temple, kept by the Vatican for centuries, were returned to Greece in March in what Pope Francis has called a gesture of friendship.