Scythian gold returns to Ukraine

Source: National Museum of the History of Ukraine

The artifacts from four museums of Crimea, which were at the exhibition ‘Crimea: Gold and Secrets of the Black Sea’ in Amsterdam, have been returned to Ukraine. They were returned after almost ten years of court trials in the Netherlands.

The exhibits will be kept in the National Museum of the History of Ukraine until the liberation of Crimea. Specialists are now examining the condition of 565 items, including ancient sculptures, Scythian and Sarmatian jewelry, and Chinese lacquer caskets. The exhibits are approximately two thousand years old.

‘During the legal disputes, our museum was designated as a storage place for the collections of the Crimean museums. This means that the museum will make every effort to preserve them for citizens and guests of Ukraine to be able to see them’, said Fedir Androschuk, the director of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine.

At the beginning of 2014, the collection of the Scythian gold was sent to an exhibition in Amsterdam at the Allard Pierson Archaeological Museum.However, after the Russian occupation of Crimea, the question arose about where to return the collection with a total insurance value of 10 million dollars.

Russia declared its rights to part of the collection, and Ukraine noted that the collection could not be returned to the occupied territory. In 2016, the District Administrative Court of Amsterdam recognized Ukraine’s rights to the collection, deciding to transfer it to Kyiv.