COLUMN ONE : Turkey Retrieves Its Riches : Tired of seeing its heritage stolen away, this cradle of ancient wonders scours the world for purloined pieces, then uses a $50-million carrot and stick to bring them home.

“Archeology is not a science; it’s a vendetta.”

-- Sir Mortimer Wheeler, British archeologist

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As 80-year-old Jale Inan tells the story in her sunlit living room above the Bosporus, a simple question of justice has taken her to war with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

“I excavated that statue; it was stolen from us, and it belongs in Turkey. I want my statue back,” she said.

Inan is battling to recover the top half of a 1,800-year-old statue of a weary Hercules. She says the marble chunk of history was stolen from an archeological dig she directs in southern Turkey.

No way, says the museum.

“I am ready to go and sit there until I get it,” she said.

A sit-in against an American cultural icon by an octogenarian Turkish scholar who is something shorter than five feet and a good bit less than 100 pounds? Maybe not, but educated fur is flying, and Inan is a pertinacious soul.

Her herculean quest is symptomatic of a new combativeness among countries that are the often unwitting and always unhappy source of antiquities. Her campaign is underwritten by a Turkish government embarked in high-profile counterattack against what it considers three centuries of plunder by villains from grave-robbing farmers to eminent archeologists.

Turkey wants its treasures back, and its assertive stick-and-carrot recovery program, which began to bear fruit last fall, is drawing attention from other Mediterranean nations alarmed at the loss of artifacts.

The undertaking is controversial. It is not calculated to comfort foreign collectors or museums. And it has become a national priority for Turkey.

Turkey is the principal source of classical artifacts that find their way to First World markets today, about $100 million to $200 million worth per year by official estimate. A crossroads nation spanning Europe and Asia, host to 36 civilizations across the centuries, Turkey claims more ancient Greek cities than Greece, more Roman cities than Italy.

“It’s amazing how much time I spend on the phone with our lawyers,” said Engin Ozgen, the ebullient professor who is director general of monuments and museums at the Turkish Ministry of Culture in Ankara.

Little wonder. Export of cultural artifacts is illegal in Turkey, and Ozgen may become history’s most litigious archeologist. He watches over a $50-million war chest that Turkey has earmarked to selectively pursue stolen or illegally exported antiquities.

“We will spend millions if necessary to prove our ownership. Sometimes collectors and museums can’t afford legal costs, but Turkey is a country; it is rich enough to pay these large bills,” Ozgen said.

Smoke from an American cigarette wreathed his well-trimmed beard as rap music ricocheted off the baroque chandelier in his office. Ozgen caressed the glossy auction catalogues that he studies in search of purloined treasure. A New York gallery withdrew a 6th-Century BC marble torso of a boy from auction last year after Turkey claimed that it was stolen.

“We can’t go after everything that has left Turkey, but we are making symbolic recoveries while at the same time educating people with the idea of stopping smuggling,” Ozgen said. “Around the world, collectors are thinking twice now about the origin of what is offered them. ‘Was it smuggled from Turkey? Will they chase us?’ ”

Beyond the Boston Hercules, Ozgen says he is also feuding with the Dumbarton Oaks Museum in Washington over 6th-Century religious objects from a Byzantine monastery. He has a lawsuit pending against a museum in Basel, Switzerland, over an inscribed stone pillar from ancient Phrygia, and he is demanding posthaste return of an errant 3,000-year-old sphinx from a Berlin museum.

Greece has also turned to American courts. It sued a New York dealer last year to recover Mycenaean jewelry from the 15th Century BC that it claims was stolen by grave robbers in 1978.

A signal victory of the nascent Turkish offensive was the return last year by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art of the 363-piece “Lydian Hoard,” an exquisite collection of silver and gold jewelry, bowls, incense burners and coins from the 6th Century BC.

Around 1966, Ozgen says, villagers near Sardis in west-central Turkey robbed a series of neighboring tombs from the time of the Lydian King Croesus (as in “rich as . . . “). By 1968, the buried treasures had found their way to New York, where the Met paid around $1.5 million for three separate lots, cautiously labeled them “East Greek” and delayed displaying them--a case of a bad conscience, it would turn out.

For more than a decade, Turkish newspaperman Ozgen Acar dogged the treasure, eventually tracing it from the villagers who stole it to pieces in the museum first significantly displayed in 1984.

The museum rejected Turkey’s claims, and the lawyers took over in 1987.

Six years and almost $3 million later, with the lawsuit still unresolved, the Met bowed gracefully last fall to what Director Philippe de Montebello called “a unique confluence of factors.”

“Turkish authorities did provide evidence that most of the material in question may indeed have been removed clandestinely from tombs in the Usak region, much of it only months before the museum acquired it,” De Montebello said at the time. More, “our own records suggested some museum staff during the 1960s were likely aware, even as they acquired these objects, that their provenance was controversial.”

The Lydian Hoard is now on display at the national Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, where Director Tuzun Gunel says it fits seamlessly into a collection of objects recovered by Turkish specialists in the area from which it was originally stolen.

Yet critics say Turkey is hardly in a position to boast about the preservation and display of antiquities it already controls. Storehouses full of less-valuable surplus antiquities slumber far from public gaze. The Lydian Hoard will eventually be displayed at a museum in Usak near where it was found, to be seen by a fraction of those who might have marveled at it in New York.

Ozgen, who oversees 175 museums and 120 excavations, says legal action for recovery is a last resort. Turkey, where by his estimate there are 200,000 burial mounds still waiting to be explored, has powerful incentives with which to repay foreigners who cooperate in the return of smuggled artifacts.

“What we have is the common cultural heritage of all humankind, and our policy is to share it. We will happily lend to exhibitions, give excavations permits, scholarships and access to our museums and archives,” Ozgen said.

In the United States, there is also the charitable American-Turkish Society. Donors wishing to dispose of, say, an awkward 2nd-Century Roman sarcophagus may give it to the foundation and write it off.

Yes, the foundation does make occasional gifts to the Turkish government.

And yes, there happened to be a particular garland sarcophagus in the Brooklyn Museum--a three-ton marble coffin of splendid mien and dubious provenance. Its owner donated the sarcophagus to the society after the museum declined to accept it as a gift; journalist Acar and a colleague, Melik Kaylan, had reconstructed its weighty journey from Anatolia to Brooklyn.

Thomas Hoving, former director of New York’s Met, says Brooklyn trustees might have accepted the sarcophagus had not Turkish newspapers a lot more recent than the 2nd Century turned up inside when the lid was pried off. The sarcophagus, valued by Turkish officials at $3.5 million, was flown home from Brooklyn last week and went on display Tuesday in the Istanbul Archeological Museum.

Writing in a recent issue of Art & Auction magazine, Hoving says, “When it comes to wresting illegally or illicitly ripped away pieces of the national artistic patrimony from the clutches of American museums, private collectors and dealers, and finagling them back home, nobody does it better than the Turks.”

Hoving calls the Turks’ use of a charitable foundation as middleman “the most creative incentive in the history of museums and collecting to guarantee the successful regaining of their priceless stolen heritage.”

The question of who owns cultural treasures of bygone civilizations--Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Chinese or Incan--has long vexed supplier and buyer alike.

After all, there have been Egyptian obelisks in Roman piazzas for 2,000 years. A procession of invaders looted Rome across the centuries: Nazi artistic pillage of occupied Europe was preceded by Napoleonic looting. Venice’s four bronze horses galloping atop St. Mark’s were lifted from Byzantine Constantinople, now Turkish Istanbul. The Istanbul Archeological Museum has a lovely set of ancient sarcophagi arduously transported from Sidon, then Ottoman-ruled, but now a city in Lebanon. Turkey, by contrast, has a powerful claim to the sphinx that German archeologists carted off in 1917 with the promise to return.

Greece, for its part, has for nearly half a century demanded the return of the Elgin Marbles--the frieze from around the Acropolis removed in the 19th Century. The British Museum, where the Marbles are a prized exhibit (along with the Rosetta stone, a linguistic celebration of three civilizations found by French troops in Egypt), refuses, arguing that such a precedent could lead to the emptying of museums around the world.

The only international treaty governing the return of artifacts is a 1970 UNESCO convention, notes Malcolm Evans, secretary general of Unidroit, an international legal institute based in Rome that is one of the United Nations’ specialized agencies. “So few ‘importing’ countries have ratified that for all intents and purposes it doesn’t work,” he said. The United States ratified the treaty in 1982.

A new convention expected to be open for ratification next year will make recovery easier for “exporting” nations ranging from Turkey to Mexico. For objects stolen from illegal excavations, and those illegally exported, the burden of proof will be reversed, Evans said. Buyers will have to prove they did everything possible to establish legal provenance. The treaty would apply only to antiquities stolen or smuggled after ratification.

In fact, it is recent thefts that most often have Ozgen reaching for his phone. The Turks say the Boston Hercules is one such case, although the museum disputes it.

In 1980, scholar Inan headed the dig at Perga in the Turkish south, a steady source of classical sculpture. One day, she recalls, word went round that something big had been stolen. Archeologists followed a suspect workman and recovered some statuary. Now, Inan says, they realize that they should have looked harder.

Later that summer, archeologists discovered the bottom half of a three-quarter life-size statue of a weary or resting Hercules. It was a 2nd-Century Roman marble version of a statue attributed to the 4th-Century BC Lysippos of Sikyon, a Greek whose bronze statues celebrated the harmony of the male body.

The Perga Hercules’ lower half is now on display at the Turkish government museum in Antalya. Inan thinks the statue broke when it fell backward, with the two pieces lying close together across the centuries.

Lo, the next year the top of a weary Hercules turned up in New York. A collector donated a half share to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. And it wasn’t long before the small world of archeology was atwitter over photographs showing a remarkable resemblance between the Boston top and the Turkish bottom.

Inan went to the United States to see for herself. Could she examine the statue, and would they tell her where they got it?

“They said yes, they said no, they said maybe,” she recalls. “They told such stories it was impossible to believe them. Maybe they really believed it was not the same statue. But it was--the same marble, the same dress, the same aging. ‘She’s wrong,’ they said. ‘She’s wrong.’ ”

Inan persisted.

After much to-ing and fro-ing and rattling of lawyers, the Turkish government hired an American sculptor to make an exact copy of its bottom half, a cast that was fitted with the Boston top in a museum storeroom under the expert and doubting eye of Cornelius Vermeule, the museum’s curator of classical art.

Here, from Art & Auction, is Hoving’s account of 1992’s Hercules showdown day in Boston:

“The marble torso was gingerly placed on top of the cast and the two pieces virtually clicked into place--perfectly, almost as if they had been magnetized--Vermeule looked up in utter astonishment. ‘I’m shocked,’ he said. ‘I’m so surprised! Well, I never . . . ‘ He gazed placidly at the experts representing Turkey’s interest and suddenly asked, ‘Say, would you be willing to discuss a shared loan?’ ”

Inan remembers: “Our lawyer was so nervous he couldn’t watch. Then everybody yelled and kissed me. ‘Congratulations,’ they said. A director of the museum said we’d have the statue back in two weeks. That was two years ago.”

“The museum does not acknowledge Turkey’s claim of ownership,” said Robert P. Mitchell, the museum’s director of public relations and marketing in written response to questions about the statue.

“There has never been any evidence that the statue was stolen, and allegations to that effect were entirely unsupported. . . . Indeed, the break between the top and bottom halves of the statue appears to be an ancient one, such that the top half could well have been removed long ago from the territory that is now known as Turkey.

“In the unfortunate event that the current settlement discussions are not successful, a lawsuit would be necessary. Such a case would raise significant questions.”

In Ankara, Ozgen says dryly that Boston is reconsidering its position on Hercules.

“The statue probably cost $100,000 to $200,000,” he said. “It may cost them $2 million to defend it in a case we think we’ll win. Is it worth that?”