MOSCOW, November 22 The Netherlands will transfer to Ukraine a collection of Scythian gold from the museums of Crimea, exhibited in Amsterdam, says the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Information Policy on social networks.
“MCIP and the Allard Pearson Museum have reached official agreements on the conditions for the return of exhibits of the Museum Fund of Ukraine from four Crimean museum institutions. Since 2014, they have been on display at the exhibition “Crimea – a golden island in the Black Sea” at the archaeological museum of the University of Amsterdam,” the ministry said in a message on the social network Facebook*.
They added that the Dutch museum will not charge Kiev the cost of storing exhibits for nine years.
Four Crimean museums – the Kerch Historical and Cultural Reserve (which later became part of the East Crimean Museum), the Central Museum of Taurida, the Bakhchisarai Historical and Cultural Reserve and the Tauride Chersonese – sent the exhibition “Crimea – Golden” in 2013 to Bonn, and then to Amsterdam island in the Black Sea.”
After the reunification of Crimea with Russia in 2014, the Netherlands had a question about who should return the collection to. On October 26, 2021, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal decided that the collection of Scythian gold should be transferred to Ukraine. In January 2022, the museums of Crimea sent a cassation appeal to the Supreme Court of the Netherlands, but the court upheld the decision.
In Russia, the court’s position was called biased. The head of the Crimean parliament, Vladimir Konstantinov, suggested that the collection of Scythian gold could end up in the hands of private Western collectors. According to the head of Crimea Sergei Aksenov, the collection was simply taken away from Crimean museums.
* The activities of Meta (social networks Facebook and Instagram) are banned in Russia as extremist.
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