One towering ancient bronze was found last year in the Sutton Place apartment of a notable New York philanthropist. Another this year in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A third bronze, the head of a young Roman boy, was seized from Fordham University in March.

Each of these ancient artefacts, and a half-dozen more like them, are believed to have once graced an elaborate shrine in a region that is now part of Turkey. Erected by locals to honour the Roman Empire at a time when it ruled that part of the world, the shrine in the ancient city of Bubon featured a pantheon of emperors, experts say.

So, Lucius Verus, it’s thought, stood next to Marcus Aurelius, his adoptive brother with whom he ruled. The statue of Septimius Severus was beside those of his wife and children. The emperors Valerian and Commodus once stood on their own plinths nearby.

But just decades ago, according to investigators from the Turkish government and the Manhattan district attorney’s office, this set of rare, larger-than-life bronzes came to be scattered around the world. Individual statues ended up in a variety of affluent homes and prestigious museums.

Now, relying on newly discovered records and interviews with regretful, at times tearful, farmers now in their 70s, the investigators say they have been able to reconstruct what happened. They say men from a nearby village found the bronzes buried on a hillside, beginning in the late 1950s and, acting in tandem over a period of years, dug up the statues, often working in large groups to facilitate their excavation. Many were then sold to an antiquities dealer they knew as “American Bob.”

His real name, investigators say, was Robert Hecht and he would become famous – and later infamous – as one of the world’s great dealers of antiquities, both looted and unlooted. Although it had been illegal under Turkish law since 1906 to sell antiquities without official permission, Hecht and others brought the bronzes to market, the investigators say.

A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU

Friday, 2 pm

Lifestyle

Our picks of the latest dining, travel and leisure options to treat yourself.

Sign Up

Authorities now have begun to seize the bronzes, one by one. Two have already been returned to Turkey. Three more have been seized, and are yet to be sent back. Another four are being sought, according to the district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit.

Some experts, and at least one museum that holds a statue being sought, have questioned whether the evidence placing these particular artifacts in Bubon is as strong as the authorities have suggested. But Matthew Bogdanos, who leads the unit, said he is undeterred.

“Everybody fights Bubon,” he said of the naysayers. “But if there were ever a case we wanted to get into a courtroom, Bubon is it.”

Some of the men who rose to lead Rome were, in fact, born in conquered lands. Severus was from modern-day Libya; the emperor Trajan from modern-day Spain. Rome allowed a measure of self-government and promoted the promise of citizenship as potent tools to keep the peace. And there was often local buy-in, evident in the shrines built by invaded peoples to show respect for their conquerors.

Known as shrines to the “imperial cult,” only a handful of them survive today in any form. One is the excavation at Bubon, according to archaeologists. From the time of Augustus, Roman emperors were venerated as gods, sometimes alongside the deities themselves. The shrine at Bubon, in what was then known as Asia Minor, is believed to have been built by local gentry as a sign of fealty to Rome. Started around AD 50, it is thought to have been in use for perhaps two centuries before it was buried in earthquakes.

The calamity, fortuitously, protected the bronze statuary at a time when discarded metal was routinely recycled into armaments. The Bubon bronzes, instead, remained underground, intact, for almost 2,000 years.

Until the farmers found them.

The restitution of the statues now, as a group, serves to highlight, experts said, the central role they played in binding the people of a remote province such as Bubon, spiritually and politically, to their counterparts in far-off Rome.

“They want to show their allegiance to Rome,” said Christina Kokkinia, an expert at the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Greece who has visited and written about Bubon. “They were proud to be Roman.”

The looting of Bubon indeed took a village, investigators say.

The farmers from Ibecik, a small community 1 ½ miles from the shrine site, told interviewers that they had known about the ancient ruins for years before they began digging up the bronzes sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s. As young men, they said, their teachers had led them up to a deep hole in the stony hillside that some came to call the “Museum.” One villager recalled some of the bronzes were piled up there, like logs in a fireplace, investigators said.

At first, just a few villagers were involved in selling off artifacts to local smugglers. But soon, the local farmers joined in groups of 20 to 30 – sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing – to excavate and carry away the heavy, large bronzes, now filled with several centuries of settled dirt. Some statues were broken into pieces to make them easier to transport, the farmers recalled. Investigators say pickax marks are still visible on the bronze of Lucius Verus.

When the money came in, many of the families shared in the proceeds.

“It was seen as the property of the village,” said Zeynep Boz, a Turkish official responsible for the return of her country’s antiquities.

The illegal excavations ebbed after 1967 when Turkish police found a headless bronze torso hidden in the local woods. That statue of Valerian, who ruled from AD 253 until his capture in battle with the Persians in AD 260, now stands in a museum in the nearby town of Burdur.

But other bronzes, investigators say, had already entered the art market. Villagers recently recalled for investigators how a pair of local smugglers ferried the artifacts in a pickup truck to the port town of Izmir, about 4 hours away. There, in the souk, or bazaar, some were sold to a dealer they called American Bob. Investigators say that, based on the evidence they have collected, the dealer was Hecht.

The evidence includes shipping and sales invoices that show Hecht in possession of remarkable 2,000-year-old Roman bronzes that had never been seen before. In the late 1960s, he sold five – four torsos and a head – to a Boston collector named Charles Lipson, who exhibited them at several museums before consigning them to a New York gallery, from which they were resold. Investigators say Hecht sold other bronzes to a second gallery in New York.

A Turkish archaeologist, Jale Inan, came to be convinced they had all come from Bubon, which she visited in 1973, drawn by reports of the looting. In 1979, she travelled to Denmark, where a museum owned a bronze head that had been purchased from Hecht. She and a curator at the Danish museum agreed that it was probably a match for a headless torso in the United States that Lipson had owned and identified as that of Septimius Severus.

In 1990, Inan returned to the hillside in Bubon to dig at the site. She spoke to local farmers who acknowledged they had taken part in illicit digging. She found a journal in which one of the looters had reconstructed what had occurred 30 years earlier. Through interviews and excavation, she plotted the positions of the statues using the stone bases that remained, the names of the emperors still inscribed on them in Greek.

In a paper and in a 1994 book, she cataloged her research, including sketches that showed how she thought some of the statues, now held by various parties around the world, would have fit onto the plinths at Bubon. She died in 2001, before she could realize the fruition of her efforts, but investigators today have built their work atop the research she started decades ago.

One summer afternoon in 2021, Boz, the Turkish official, sat outside the village cafe in Ibecik’s main square and addressed about 90 farmers gathered at tables under the trees.

She described how, once Turkey adopted its antiquity law in 1906, there was no such thing as private ownership of buried antiquities. She assured the villagers they would not be prosecuted for events 60 years earlier and asked them for any old letters, photos or other evidence that could help get the statues back.

“Your village has been robbed to its bones,” she said. “It harms the country’s reputation. Please help me here.”

“In the beginning, they were like, ‘We don’t want to. The people have all died,’” Boz said in an interview. “But then slowly, slowly they understood our only purpose was making things good and they started talking to us.”

Boz and officials from the museum at Burdur eventually found 10 men who recalled the looting. Their testimony is crucial to Turkey’s repatriation claim, one now supported by New York investigators and other experts.

But not all experts agree that each of the statues was looted from Bubon. Some argue that Bubon was too much of a backwater to have housed such monumental bronzes or that the evidence is inconclusive.

Kokkinia, of the National Hellenic Research Foundation, said that, although she appreciates Inan’s research, she questions whether her archaeological techniques were sufficiently rigorous to have decided the question. She suggests further investigation at the site before every statue is shipped to Turkey.

“I love Bubon,” she said. “Let it have all the statues in the world. But it’s not necessarily scientifically correct in all cases.”

The New York investigators say they have recovered additional evidence that illustrates the scope of the looting at the shrine, including the Hecht invoices, the testimony of the villagers from Ibecik, and arms and legs from bronze statues that may also be tied to the shrine. (Hecht, who died in 2012, was accused several times of antiquities trafficking but was never convicted.)

Several of the villagers have correctly identified the statues now being targeted as looted from a lineup of other ancient bronzes. Some have mimicked the poses of the bronzes for investigators to show they remembered what they looked like, investigators said.

“There is this unbelievable heartening thing happening where people are coming forward in their 70s and saying, ‘I have been living with this for 55 years,’” Bogdanos of the district attorney’s office said.

This year, when the statues of Septimius Severus and Lucius Verus were returned, two of the looters, now in their 70s, were invited to see them.

“They were very emotional,” Boz said. “They really regret it. You can see it in their eyes.” NYTIMES