A prestigious French museum.  Broken display cases.  Historic jewels carried away, followed by headlines, speculation, and an urgent search for the missing treasures.  For anyone following recent museum thefts, the outline sounds familiar.  But this particular ripped-from-the-headlines story began one century ago this month at the Château de Chantilly, with its most famous exhibit eventually turning up inside an apple.

The men responsible were two young Alsatian amateurs, Léon-Émile Kauffer and Émile Souter.  They accessed the museum by crossing the moat around the château via the Pont de la Voilière and then propping two ladders along the walls to access the château's upper floor.  Once inside, they emptied the gallery's display cases and fled, taking the early morning train back to Paris.  Unfortunately, their haul extended well beyond the rare French diamond.

The château theft was discovered the following morning. According to Le Parisien’s reconstruction, a guard carrying out his rounds around seven o’clock reached the Cabinet des Gemmes and found the display cases broken open.  In only a few hours,, the incident had became a major international news story, hitting the front page of the New York Times that same morning, and proving that audacious and daring museum heists made for good news copy even one hundred years ago. 

An inventory of the theft published by Le Figaro listed a total of 69 objects taken, including gold bracelets bearing family portraits, enamelled watches, precious boxes, a diamond-set Legion of Honour cross awarded in 1809 by Napoleon I to General Baron Aymard, as well as jewelled weapons.  These included a pearl and ruby encrusted dagger and sheath associated with Abd el-Kader, seized during the Duke d’Aumale’s attack on the Smalah, and a diamond-ornamented dagger and belt plate presented to the duke in 1946 by the Bey of Tunis in 1846.

This inventory matters.  Describing the loss simply as “jewels” compresses a collection of craftsmanship, personal relationships, diplomacy, and colonial conquest into a category defined by the sum of its materials.  Yet, each object in its own rights, carries a history that cannot be preserved merely by recovering an equivalent weight of gold or a handful of loose precious or semi-precious stones.

For the fruits of their labour the thieves managed to obtain 30,000 francs [about $1,200 at the time] through second-hand jewellers.  One of them, a woman named Maria Schill, had a jewellery shop on Boulevard de Strasbourg.  She is said to have sold some of the loose stones and melted down the gold which was then sold by the receiver to different "honest" dealers.

Luckily for France, the thieves willing-to-turn-a-blind-eye intermediaries refused to buy the pink diamond, perhaps because its hue and size made it too easily recognizable. Thankfully, none of the coinvolved knew an obliging lapidarist who could have altered the diamond to change its appearance. 

over the next two months the investigation produced a development almost too strange for fiction.  The Grand Condé diamond was said to have been discovered inside an apple among Kaufer’s belongings on 18 December 1926, at the Hotel Métropole, at 56 Boulevard de Strasbourg in Paris. The precise account, however, deserves some caution.

Various newspapers reported conflicting accounts: one described a chambermaid biting into the fruit, while another describes a cook cutting it with a knife after the hotel manager examined luggage left against an unpaid bill.  The apple is common to both versions, but the often-repeated scene of a servant biting into a priceless diamond is not the only contemporary account.  Nor would it have been feasible to hide a diamond of that size in an unaltered piece of fruit.

One thing is for certain, the diamond's recovery made for irresistible storytelling. Though the fate of the remaining dismantled objects was considerably less charming.  The suspected receiver in this theft, having been arrested, reported that they had even thrown some objects into the Seine because they considered them unsaleable.  These unsettling historic accounts illustrate that finding the famous diamond and historic jewellery unfortunately doesn't mean recovering the collection intact.  

Here, this story's comparison with museum jewel heists today becomes particularly uncomfortable.  Historic jewels can be valued as a complete object, with its workmanship and documented associations, or treated as a supply of saleable components.  The second calculation destroys everything that made the first possible.  If we are lucky, the most recognisable pieces may survive precisely because they are difficult to sell, while less celebrated objects can be dismantled and dispersed.

A similar story unfolded in 2013 during the jewellery heist of the 27 pieces from the Castellani collection on Easter weekend at Rome's Museo Nazionale Etrusco.  With the police having closed in on their primary buyer, the accomplices set about dismantling and dispersing the stolen jewellery trying to sell the pilfered pieces for the sum of its parts. 

All this to say that museum jewel heists are plainly not a new phenomenon.  Nor is their audacity as ingenuity.  That should make their continued occurrence one hundred years on, all the more troubling.  The apple gives Chantilly’s story its memorable ending, but it should not distract us from the damages to the collection stolen with it.  A recovered headline object may become a symbol of success while quieter, irreversible losses slip out of memory.  

A century later, those losses still deserve our attention.

A royal diamond necklace has vanishes as 

Europe’s museum theft wave continues.

Yesterday, two men entered Vienna’s Museum für angewandte Kunst known as the MAK, during opening hours and smashed a display case with a hammer, before escaping on foot with a historic platinum and diamond necklace valued at approximately US$4 million.

According to Austrian police, at around 14:00 yesterday, two suspects, viewable on CCTV footage,  bought tickets, and visited the exhibition "Glanzstücke", which opened in June at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna's city center.  While no one was injured during the theft, at least one of the accomplices is said to have been armed while the other carried a hammer used to break into the vitrine where the necklace was held.

Forty-nine jewellery pieces, created by twentieth century sculptor, painter, and Italian partisan, Umberto Mastroianni have disappeared during a burglary between Tuesday and Wednesday night at the house-museum, Vittoriale degli Italiani in Gardone Riviera, which was once home to Italian poet and novelist Gabriele D'Annunzio.  One object was dropped when the thief or thieves departed. All of the pieces had been on temporary loan, as part of an exhibition titled: Come un oro caldo e fluido. Gli ori di Umberto Mastroianni, curated by Alberto Dambruoso, which featured bracelets, pendants, rings, brooches, plates and sculptures created by the artist between the 1950s and 1990s using the 'lost wax' method.  

Up until the 1940s the artist was a classical sculptor in the traditional sense, only later creating the contemporary styles stolen in this heist. With losses currently estimated to be at one million euros, a press conference is scheduled for tomorrow to provide further details regarding the burglary. 

As those who read our earlier article this week have seen, ARCA matched several of the recovered jewellery pieces to exhibitions which displayed 21 pieces of jewellery owned by LLC Rodovid Museum.  This relatively new company is controlled by Ukrainian businessman Igor Didkovsky, who, during the presidency of now deposed Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko, was once the director of the Art Arsenal from 2007 to 2010.  

From August 2007 to June 2009, Didkovsky also headed the Viche political party, which has since changed its name to Aktsent (in 2018).  Didkovsky has described himself as the president of the RODOVID group of companies as well as the Chairman of the supervisory board of ВАТ КУА ІСІ "МИР", which appears to be a closed-end venture investment fund.  

Interviewed in 2012, Didkovsky boasted that he was the owner of the largest collection of Scythian gold in the world. At the time of these statements, it was reported that his collection included 4 pectorals as well as the only belt of a Scythian queen.  All of which the collector claimed to have purchased for "a small amount of money."   

Igor Didkovsky and the belt of a Scythian queen

Didkovsky's collection has been displayed in 2009 in an Art Arsenal exhibition titled “From the Depths”. In 2010 it popped up briefly at a meeting of the "Club of Successful Women", in Kyiv.  And lastly, over three days, the gold was displayed at the International Forum of Investment and Innovation held at the Fairmont Grand Hotel Kyiv from May 15 -17, 2013.  

As has been stated in the Policia Nacional press release, the joint Spanish - Ukrainian investigation was kickstarted in 2021 with the private sale of what was described as a Scythian "gold belt with ram heads that was deposited in a safe in Madrid."   If the object identified in the Spain case is the same belt of a Scythian queen mentioned by Didkovsky, we now have a Facebook social media photo identifying that specific artefact, when it was listed as part of the exhibition held at the Kyiv hotel.

Black Archaeology + wealth + unethical collecting + confllict excavations

At its peak in the Middle Ages, the Slavic kingdom of the Kyivan Rus, as Ukraine was then known, extended north from the Black Sea to encompass most of what is now western Russia.  Rich in history, Ukraine's movable cultural heritage includes material from Paleolithic and Neolithic settlements, the settlements of the Trypillian people, and the rare, but glittery, gold-filled Scythian and Sarmatian burial sites.

Other Scythian sites can be found on either side of the Kerch Straits between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, as well as in the Caucasus Mountains primarily along the Kuban River and in the contested area of Crimea.  

Unfortunately, privately collecting by the country's elite who too often have an odious lack of concern for an object's origins, is all too prevalent.  Following its independence, Ukraine has seen the rise of several private archaeological collections, of which only a few have any footprint in the public domain.  

In addition to Didkovsky's we also have the Feldman collection, which was started by Oleksandr Feldman, and is now part of the Feldman Family Museum project in Kharkiv, the Platar and the Yushchenko collections.

Sergei Platonov died in 2005, leaving his ancient art collection, the Platar, to his heirs and business partners.  While living, he often indicated that he and his colleague, politician Sergey Taruta, bought material specifically to protect Ukraine's heritage from avaricious foreigners.  Like Didkovsky, Platonov didn't shy away from acknowledging to have purchased artefacts sourced via black archaeology -- the looting of archaeological sites, rather than through the ethical purchase of artefacts already in circulation from legitimate sources. 

Recently, in May 2023 Censor.NET journalist Tetyana Nikolayenko published a copy of the letter in which the Security Service of Ukraine confirmed the opening of an investigation after State Customs at the border in the Lviv region detained Chinese objects from the same Platar collection mentioned earlier.  According to statements by this collection's patrons, Sergei Platonov's son Mykola Platonov and Sergey Taruta, the items were being exported to Prague for an exhibition at the Galerie Gema s.r.o, a rather oddly selected venue for historic pieces of that calibre. 

In 2021, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation issued a permit for archaeological work in occupied Crimea specifically at the site of Chersonesus.  Working in an area covering some 400,000 square meters, the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Archaeology of Crimea of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Sevastopol State University began excavating, in some cases using heavy equipment and improper scientific methods as trenches were cleared.

This exploration is openly reported on the Hermitage website, despite the fact that it  violates the 1954 Hague Convention,

According to this report published by the State Hermatage Museum, excavations by their researchers uncovered 70 objects which were then transferred to the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia in contravention of Ukraine's cultural heritage laws.   

These objects included:

"a set of dishes for a funeral meal (jugs, bowls, drinking vessels), clay lamps, glass balsamaria, bone and bronze pyxides, small household items made of non-ferrous and precious metals, jewelry and clothing decorative elements, agate and carnelian beads, pendants from Egyptian faience. Gold eyecups and mouthpieces were discovered in the urns - details of the funeral rites of noble citizens of Roman times."

It should be underscored that the provisions of the Second Protocol to the Hague Convention of 1954 for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict states as follows:

Article 9 - Protection of cultural property in occupied territory 

1. Without prejudice to the provisions of Articles 4 and 5 of the Convention, a Party in occupation of the whole or part of the territory of another Party shall prohibit and prevent in relation to the occupied territory: 

(a) any illicit export, other removal or transfer of ownership of cultural property; 

(b) any archaeological excavation, save where this is strictly required to safeguard, record or preserve cultural property; 

(c) any alteration to, or change of use of, cultural property which is intended to conceal or destroy cultural, historical or scientific evidence. 

2. Any archaeological excavation of, alteration to, or change of use of, cultural property in occupied territory shall, unless circumstances do not permit, be carried out in close cooperation with the competent national authorities of the occupied territory.

Just my way of saying to those in a position of wealth and/or power the axe forgets, but the tree remembers.

By:  Lynda Albertson

Officers working with Spain's Policía Nacional have recovered a collection of Scythian, Greek craftsmanship VIII-IVth century BCE gold jewellery.  The pieces, which consist mainly of necklaces and earrings, had been fenced by a criminal network involved in the sale of Ukraine-sourced antiquities via a web of sales transactions, at least one of which was identified in Madrid.   

According to statements released by Spain's National Police, the jewellery had previously been exhibited in an unnamed Kyiv museum between 2009-2013.  While the museum was not mentioned in the law enforcement press release, one of the striking pieces was fairly easy to recognise, which has helped identify at least one public showing of several of the now-seized pieces.  

The piece we first recognised is a striking openwork royal chest decoration, made up of four strands of woven gold, depicting images of animals and plants.  The object is similar to the famous Mozolevsky pectoral, found in 1971 in the Tolstaya Mogila mound near Ordzhonikidze.  This one however is stated to have possibly come from Kul-oba, a burial mound of a Scythian leader, discovered in 1830 near Kerch, Crimea which was partially looted prior to formal excavations. 

This recovered pectoral, a second container for storing aromatic oils decorated with carnelian stones, a pair of the earrings, a pin, and a collar necklace all match objects which have been part of an exhibition entitled “From the Depths” which was held at the then unfinished Mystetskyi Arsenal Museum on Mazepa Street in Kiev.  

Along with unique exhibits from state museums, the exhibition included a grouping of gold jewellery from the private museum collection "Rodovid", and were registered with the Ministry of Culture with inventory numbers. None of these items could be sold or taken out of Ukraine (unless their export was authorised for a  exhibition loan).

The seized jewellery is believed to have been smuggled illegally out of Ukraine on/around 2016.  Police have indicated that the confiscated cultural assets had been shopped with forged ownership documents which claimed that the jewellery was the legal property of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.  To assist in carrying out this ruse, the objects were marketed through a priest who is reported to live in the Spanish capital.

For the present, all of the recovered  pieces are being studied at the National Archaeological Museum and the Cultural Heritage Institute of Spain.

By: Lynda Albertson