Staff Reporter
SPAIN’s Police have recovered an ancient Roman funeral artefact stolen from a Bulgarian museum more than two decades ago.
The 2nd-century Roman funerary stele depicting a Thracian horseman was stolen in May 1996 from the Razgard City Museum.
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Art history professor at the University of Grenoble in France, Djamila Fellague, discovered the piece up for sale in Spain on a well-known auction website based in the Netherlands, in August last year.
The expert in funerary architecture and sculpture contacted the Spanish police to report the sale.
The police saw that the funerary stele had been registered by the Bulgarian authorities on Interpol and set out to locate the current owner, also involving the Dutch authorities.
During the investigation, it was discovered, the piece had been acquired by the current owner in 2020 and had previously come from a private collection at the since-closed Biblical and Oriental Museum in León since 2010. Those items had belonged to a French collector who died in 2023.
The current owner was finally located, and he voluntarily handed it over to the police, stating he was unaware it was originally stolen.
A ceremony was held at the Bulgarian Embassy in Spain, and the piece was finally back in the hands of Bulgaria.
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