Page 12 - Bloomberg Businessweek July 2018

“I CANNOT STAND THAT THERE IS SUCH DISRESPECT TO THE MOST SACRED THINGS”

government excavations for fieldwork experience, and Tsirogiannis to the University of Cambridge to turn his
he passed exams by studying friends’ class notes. After a archival work into a doctoral thesis.
handful of short-term archaeology jobs, he began his man- From that perch, Tsirogiannis claimed his first auction
datory military service in 2002, turning his remote post- house scalp, in 2010 at Bonhams in London. “I identi-
ings into expeditions. On Crete he discovered an ancient fied three busts depicted in fragmentary condition in
fortification and gathered pottery for a local museum. As the Symes-Michaelides archive that, at Bonhams, were
an army officer in 2003, Tsirogiannis discovered an ancient restored in such a way that gave the impression they
settlement and cemetery on the Greek-Albanian border. It had never been broken,” he said. The same catalog also
helped him win his first of several contracts as a govern- had a marble statue he matched to a Polaroid from the
ment archaeologist in 2004. Medici archive in which the piece sat uncleaned on a table.
That same year, a judge in Rome convicted Medici on Bonhams removed the objects from sale.
trafficking charges. About the same time, related investi- Tsirogiannis had changed the rules of the game.
gations had netted other photo caches. One raid on the Others had called out the houses for their practices, but
Swiss vaults of Sicilian dealer Gianfranco Becchina yielded no one had done so with such a powerful trove of visu-
a huge trove. Another police mission, on a remote Greek als. “His approach has made auction houses and other
island, brought Tsirogiannis into the hunt. dealers take due diligence much more seriously,” said
His work for the government had introduced him David Gill, a professor at the University of Suffolk who
to the Greek police art squad, which specializes in cultural heritage issues
needed archaeologists to identify and helped supervise Tsirogiannis’s
looted artifacts on raids. In April 2006, grad work. Sotheby’s contends that
Tsirogiannis went to a villa that housed the industry’s due diligence would
the belongings of British antiquities benefit if the archives were made pub-
dealer Robin Symes and his late part- lic. “Regrettably, those materials have
ner, Christo Michaelides, on the island been and remain at present completely
of Schoinoussa. While Symes was away, inaccessible—except to one private indi- 65
Tsirogiannis and the police spent four vidual,” it said in a statement. Bonhams
days searching the property for arti- has asked for access to the archive, “to
facts. They were successful but didn’t assist the rigorous due diligence that
find the documentation they sus- we do for each object in our sales,” said
pected might be there. They returned spokeswoman Lucinda Bredin.
to Athens only to be sent back after the To date, Tsirogiannis said, he’s
head of the art squad got new infor- matched more than 50 objects at auc-
mation. On the penultimate day of the second trip, the tion and disrupted at least $10 million in sales. One of the
team combed through a storage room next to one of the biggest was a Sardinian marble female idol put up for sale
complex’s many kitchens. There they stumbled upon at Christie’s in December 2014 for an estimate as high as
17 albums bound in dark green leather and embossed with $1.2 million. Tsirogiannis linked the gleaming figure in the
gold lettering, containing, Tsirogiannis said, “photographs catalog to an image of a yellowed and cracked object in the
of unique masterpieces from nearly all ancient civiliza- Medici archive. Christie’s pulled the idol from the auction.
tions.” (Symes was investigated, but never indicted, in the he move to Cambridge changed his life. Tsirogiannis
FROM LEFT: COURTESY CHRISTIE’S; COURTESY GIACOMO MEDICI Times that he knowingly sold looted goods.) the classics faculty, Helen Van Noorden, who specializes
broader Medici probe. Symes, who couldn’t be reached for
comment, denied in a 2005 interview with the Los Angeles Tgot his doctorate and married an Englishwoman on

In July 2006, at a two-day meeting at police headquar-
in Greek epic poetry. They named their daughter and son
after figures from Greek mythology.
ters in Athens, the Italians gave the Greek team digital
To his frustration, Tsirogiannis doesn’t make a cent as
copies of the Medici and Becchina archives. Tsirogiannis
now had the core of his collection. By 2008 his investi-
a Robin Hood—though he does have a book contract from
an academic press to publish his dissertation. Since com-
gative work with the photos had become well known in
antiqui ties circles. Professor Colin Renfrew, a member
pleting his doctorate, he’s worked as a researcher for the
Trafficking Culture project at the University of Glasgow
of the House of Lords and the godfather of academics
and for a commercial archaeology unit in Cambridge
who advocate for repatriating ancient objects, invited
Medici, pictured in July 1980 at a Christie’s auction in London