ART-CZECH REPUBLIC: Smugglers Sack The Nation

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jiri Kunc

PRAGUE, Nov 12 1996 (IPS) - Czech officials are finding themselves effectively powerless to stop thieves plundering art and antiquities from the country’s churches, monasteries, museums, galleries and cultural monuments.

Police estimate that more than 50,000 artworks and artefacts of historical value, worth more than 10 billion dollars, have been stolen and sold abroad during the past few years.

One raid alone claimed 14 renaissance and baroque paintings from Namesti nad Ostlavou castle in western Bohemia in 1992, including works by Canaletto, Veronese and Tintoretto. A 30 million dollar collection of Picassos were grabbed in a daring 1991 theft in Prague.

“Some robberies have caused irreparable loss to the cultural legacy of the Czech Republic,” admits Pavel Jirasek, director of security systems for the country’s cultural ministry.

Frantisek Prokopius, spokesman for the police department charged with halting the trade says the number of robberies has radically increased, mainly in churches and convents.

“Before 1989, when the country was under communist rule, there were about 35 cases of robberies of artistic objects from Czech churches, but now they have increased many fold — there were more than 400 raids last year alone.” The most affected churches are in west Bohemia, close to the German border. In some, he says, there is “nothing left worth stealing”.

Officials estimate that the country’s 5,600 churches in the country hold some three million pieces of art, many priceless or irreplaceable, but only some 100,000 are formally registered.

Fewer than 1,000 churches and arts centres have any kind of burglar alarm system, leaving the rest virtually unprotected from raids staged by well organised gangs feeding dealers in stolen artefacts in Germany and Austria.

In a report last year by the J. Paul Getty Trust, one of the world’s leading art buyers, ‘Protecting Cultural Objects’, the Czech Republic was said to be losing about 10 percent of its national heritage every year to thieves and smugglers.

Only the illegal trades in narcotics and arms now outstrip the smuggled stolen art business out of the Czech Republic.

The rewards are great. “In Germany the money the dealers get for a baroque vase or some sculpture from the 1920s, may be four or five times more than obtainable on the local market,” says Laroslave Zavadsky, chief detective at the interior ministry division dealing with art theft.

Last June German police in Wiesbaden seized 14 ‘old masters’ worth an estimated 2.3 million stolen from Czech art galleries in 1990 and 1992; the works included Bellotto’s ‘City View with Fortress’, worth an estimated 400,000 dollars and Veronese’s ‘Historical Scene with Ancient Architecture’, worth 300,000 dollars, all stolen from the Namesti nad Ostlavou castle in western Bohemia in February 1992.

The most spectacular theft to date however remains the snatching of four Picasso paintings worth an estimated 30 million dollars, taken from the Czech National Gallery in 1991. The works, including the famous ‘Port of Cadaques’, were eventually recovered intact. One of the stolen paintings, ‘Absinthe and Playing Card’, was found by German police in a Bavarian railway station.

However, while police arrested about 300 suspects in connection with art robberies in 1995, only six percent of the stolen goods were recovered — the result, concede police, of lack of resources, ineffectiveness, slow procedures and the lack of reliable descriptions of the missing objects.

To confront this problem, some hope lies in an initiative by the Getty Trust’s Getty Information Institute, a unit of the massively wealthy Los Angeles foundation that operates the Getty Museum in Malibu, California. It surveyed 107 arts organisations in 42 countries before offering up a standardised means of data collection as an answer to this problem.

Others that have been working with the Getty since 1993 to devise standardised identification standards include the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the Council of Europe, the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Interpol, dealers and insurance consultants.

The Getty group proposes a checklist of 11 categories beginning with an image, whether on video, photographic or even sketched, described in brief, with information on its acquisition, history and value, form, materials and technique, measurements, inscriptions and markings, distinguishing features — and title and maker’s name.

But even if this system comes into widespread use there are still problems. “It is hard to find qualified officials who can calculate the value of the stolen objects,” says Zavadsky.

“By the time the police learns of the robberies, those pieces are already out of the country. Most of the time they already have a client expecting the pieces and the movements are very fast.”

Prokopius thinks that the international police cooperation, including that conducted through Interpol, is ineffective as these multi-national initiatives are too diversified. He calls for the founding of dedicated special teams of police set to track the criminals from scene of crime to the final dealer and his customer.

“In the meantime, there are also about 35,000 cultural items in the country at risk whose value cannot be measured by money alone — they are part of the historical and cultural heritage of this nation,” he says.

“Some steps forward have been taken to modernise, sophisticated alarms have been installed in important museums. But in the face of the magnitude of the problem, it is still nothing.”