Karun Treasure.

Karun Treasure.

Karun Treasure.
Karun Treasure is the name given to a collection of 363 valuable Lydian artifacts dating from the 7th century BC and originating from Uşak Province in western Türkiye, which were the subject of a legal battle between Türkiye and New York Metropolitan Museum of Art between 1987–1993 and which were returned to Türkiye in 1993 after the Museum admitted it had known the objects were stolen when they purchased them. The collection is alternatively known also as the Lydian Hoard and the “Croesus Treasure”. Although the artifacts were closely contemporary to Croesus, whether they should be directly associated with the legendary Lydian king or not, remains debatable.
The main and the most precious part of the treasure comes from a tomb chamber of a Lydian princess reached through illegal excavations carried out by three fortune-seekers from Güre village, at the proximity of which the tomb was located. After having dug for days and unable to break through the marble masonry of the chamber door, the intruders dynamited the roof of the tomb in the night of June, 6 1966, to be the first to see the breathtaking sight of the buried Lydian noblewoman and her treasures after 2600 years. The treasure looted from this particular tomb was enriched by further finds by the same men from other tumuli of the locality during 1966-1967. The collection was smuggled out from Türkiye in separate dispatches through İzmir and Amsterdam, to be bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art between 1967–1968, at an invoiced cost of $1.2 million for 200 of the pieces within the collection.
At present the returned items are exhibited in the Uşak Museum of Archaeology.
The collection made sensational news once again in May 2006 when a key piece, a golden hippocamp, on display in Uşak Museum along with the rest of the collection, was discovered to have been switched with a fake, probably between March and August 2005.
The treasure is sometimes also associated with a curse. Legend has it that the several men involved with the illegal digs “died violent deaths or suffered great misfortune”.