Lecture
BABESCH Byvanck Lecture 2025
- Date
- Tuesday 20 May 2025
- Time
- Address
- National Museum of Antiquities, Rapenburg 28, 2311 TV Leiden
- Room
- Tempelzaal
Normalizing Loot: A Case Study of a Plundered Imperial Shrine
The board of the BABESCH Foundation has the pleasure to invite you to the eighteenth BABESCH Byvanck Lecture in collaboration with the National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden. The lecture will be held on Tuesday 20 May at 7.30 pm (doors 7.00 pm), in the Temple Hall of the museum. Admission is free but registration is required, before 12 May, through this link.
This talk will discuss a corpus of dozens of life-size bronze statues of Roman emperors and empresses that were looted in the 1960s at Bubon, an unexcavated site in southern Türkiye, and ended up in collections across the U.S. What was this site originally? What was lost in the process of their looting? Why –and how– are some museums resisting efforts to return these statues to Türkiye today?