Speaking at a government session on the state of the tourism industry on April 26, Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirzyev sounded the alarm: the country is facing “a massive theft of artifacts from museums”, reports the site Eurasianet.
In thirty years, since the accession of this post-Soviet country to independence in 1991, “fourteen museums lost some 3,000 items of cultural value, totaling an estimated $355 million”said the head of state.
Mirzioev raised this issue after receiving a report on the inspection of a museum complex in the historic city of Khiva. It was found that in 101 cases, “The exhibits did not match the description, implying that genuine items may have been stolen.” According to images posted by the State Inspectorate on its Telegram account, among the stolen items are small arms, metal containers, clothes, coins and a military award from the early Soviet period. At least 81 counterfeit objects were discovered in another museum, in Bukhara.
Creation of a digital inventory
To put an end to this looting, the president ordered the creation of a “universal digital inventory of all museums in the country”. The Attorney General’s Office and the Ministry of Tourism and Cultural Heritage have been tasked with this Herculean task.
While the widespread theft of works of art and cultural treasures has not been a secret for many years, the subject came to the fore again in December 2021, when the Uzbek site Kun.uz reported that at least “fifty-six manuscripts and six lithographs allegedly stolen from Mirzo Ulugbek National University library”.
The documents, believed to have been discovered missing in 2019, included valuable medieval manuscripts, including “some dating from the 13the century”. These objects “have probably been resold abroad”.
Nothing stops the looters: “Sometimes they even break and resell finishing elements of buildings”, écrit Eurasianet. In 2020, the British newspaper The Guardian reported that the British Museum was coordinating the repatriation to Uzbekistan of six earthenware dating from the 13the and XIVe centuries stolen from the Shah-e Zendeh memorial complex, Samarkand. According to the newspaper, the earthenware, hidden in a suitcase, had been smuggled into the United Kingdom via Dubai.