Treasure-Hunters and Organized Criminals: Looters and Traffickers of Antiquities in Turkey
By Dr. Samuel Andrew Hardy (Heritage Management Organization)
Followed by a Panel with Zeynep Boz (Ministry of Culture and Tourism), Gürcan Türkoğlu (Ambassador, R.) and Işılay Gürsu (BIAA) as a moderator.
In C Blok Amphi, Faculty of Humanities on Wednesday 23rd November at 17:30.
Abstract
Around the world, the illegal trade in historic artefacts and fake goods involves everyone from superstitious treasure-hunters and cynical business people, to corrupt officials and organized criminals. Due to its economic and political insecurity on one side, and the moral commitment and practical action of its cultural heritage workers and law enforcement agents on the other, Turkey is a prime example of the functioning of the illegal trade, the harms of the crimes, the challenges of policing and the politics of policing around the world. This lecture will particularly consider the activities of organized criminals and violent extremists, as they threaten heritage and society right now.
Bio Samuel Hardy
Dr. Samuel Andrew Hardy is a cultural property criminologist, who has worked for UNESCO and NGOs such as the International Council of Museums, as well as universities, and delivered training for law enforcement agents, cultural heritage workers and other concerned professionals. He is now the head of illicit trade research for the Heritage Management Organization and, currently, the honorary fellow in cultural heritage and conflicts in Eastern Europe at the University of Oslo’s Norwegian Institute in Rome. He has conducted interdisciplinary fieldwork research in Kosovo, Cyprus, Turkey and Jordan and other interdisciplinary open-source research into illicit trafficking of cultural objects, political violence towards cultural property and heritage politics in zones of conflict and crisis, particularly in Ukraine and Turkey.
Bio Zeynep Boz
Zeynep Boz works as the Head of the Department for Combatting Illicit Trafficking at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey. After graduating from the Department of Prehistory at Ankara University, she started her professional career in 2007 as an associate expert in the Ministry. She gained her expert title upon defending her expertise thesis on the UNIDROIT 1995 Convention and Bilateral Agreements in 2010. She was invited to join the UNESCO 1970 Convention Secretariat in 2014. In 2015, she was appointed as the focal point of UNESCO to the UN Security Council for the implementation of the paragraphs 15-17 of the UNSC Resolution 2199. She returned to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey in early 2017. Her responsibilities include the implementation of the UNESCO 1970 Convention, organizing training and awareness-raising programs, contributing to the planning of Turkey’s policies on preventing illicit trafficking at the international level as well as dealing with restitution cases, coordinating all domestic agencies for preventative measures. In 2018ZeynepBoz drafted “a toolkit for European judiciary and law enforcement” for UNESCO. She holds three Ministerial awards and several certificates of achievement related to the fight against illicit trafficking as well as a diploma of Art, Law and Ethics (Institute of Art and Law, London, UK).
Bio Gürcan Türkoğlu
Hüsnü Gürcan Türkoğlu is a retired Ambassador. He is a graduate of Faculty of Political Sciences of Ankara University. He represented Turkey in Palestine, Iran and at UNESCO as ambassador. He also served at Turkish missions in Jeddah, Oslo, Madrid, Damascus, New York (UN) and Baghdad. He was elected as Chairperson of The UNESCO World Heritage Committee (2015) and Vice-President of the UNESCO National Commission of Turkey (2014-2016).
Bio Işılay Gürsu
Işılay Gürsu is assistant director for cultural heritage at the British Institute at Ankara. She has an MA at Koç University’s ‘Anatolian Civilizations and Cultural Heritage Management’ programme and a PhD in Cultural Heritage Management from IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca, Italy. She joined the BIAA upon completion of her PhD as post-doctoral research fellow. She was the Co-Investigator of the research project ‘Living Amid the Ruins: Archaeological Sites as Hubs of Sustainable Development in Southwest Turkey’, which received funding from the British Academy’s Sustainable Development Programme. She was involved in drafting the SARAT (Safeguarding Archaeological Assets of Turkey) project application, and worked as part of the project, between 2017-2020. SARAT won the 2020 Europa Nostra Award in the category Education, Training and Awareness-Raising.
Dr. Gürsu has edited a BIAA monograph entitled ‘Public Archaeology: Theoretical Approaches and Current Practices’ in 2019 and her academic interests include public archaeology as a way of understanding relationship between archaeology and contemporary society. She has directed a short documentary ‘Living Amid the Ruins’ visualising the results of the British Academy funded public archaeology project, available on the BIAA’s youtube channel: https://bit.ly/3uvMcDg
She has recently received a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship which will start in January 2023 to publish her monograph on ‘Public Understanding of Archaeology in Turkey’.