trinkets, false leads and forgeries – the first few photos of the Gaza ‘Apollo’

Whatever the Gaza “Apollo” is(n’t), these aren’t it (either)…

When was the “Apollo” of Gaza taken into “custody”?

David Meadows is doing a series on the “Apollo” (tray-bearer) statue from Gaza. So far, he’s written a post on fishy tales and a note on Arabic-language news reports. Vernon Silver showed David articles from Sama News and Palestine Press, including one without the Smurf-pattern bedsheet. But I don’t think it’s the sheet that’s been removed. I think it’s the statue…

Illicit antiquities in the Attorney-General’s house?

Now that ‘Self-Defence [Самооборони]’ (civil order) guards have secured it, protester-tourists have visited Attorney-General/Prosecutor-General Viktor Pshonka’s house in Gorenichi (outside Kyiv), too (as they did the president’s residence before). Soon, there will be an entire circuit of literally stately homes, properties bought and embellished with the pay for state work and the benefits of state power. And just as they found suspected illicit antiquities at Yanukovych’s residence, so they found suspected illicit antiquities at Pshonka’s house.

a truly historic artefact: the National Art Museum of Ukraine wants the Maidan trebuchet

The National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU) [Національний Художній Музей України (НХМУ)] has appealed for the preservation of the Maidan trebuchet.

Public antiquities in the president’s residence?

Since Viktor Yanukovych’s retreat from Kyiv, many Ukrainians have visited the president’s country residence, and seen the wealth and wastefulness for which he was legendary – fleets of classic cars and boats; a wooden galleon; a private zoo; a folly of Classical ruins; grotesquely, golden eagles that had been crucified, seemingly by extremists as effigies of the synonymous Berkut special police… And they’ve found a couple of questionable and/or questionably-acquired antiquities.

the Ukrainian museum of police atrocities

In the midst of the conflict, resisters and observers have gathered forensic evidence of the violence. For example, Postup Human Rights Centre (joint) coordinator Konstantin Reutski ‘picked up [Подобранное]’ shell cartridges(1), grenade rings and a car stopper near Zhovtnevogo (in Kyiv). Now the resisters have created a temporary exhibition.

Lenin down and out in Ukraine

On the 8th of December 2013, nationalist Svoboda (Freedom Party) activists meticulously planned and pulled down a statue of Lenin in Kyiv. In the last 48 hours, however, a dozen or more Lenins have been toppled across the country, even in stereotypically regime-aligned Dnipropetrovsk.

Why was the Gaza statue’s left eye gouged out?

As Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Vernon Silver and the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in Gaza observed, the Gaza “Apollo” (or, more likely but less romantically, the Gaza tray-bearer) has ‘one intact inlaid eye‘ and one missing. But one thing that I don’t believe has been discussed is when and why it lost its left eye.

The Apollo of Gaza or the tray-bearer?

Two quick notes (while several posts are on their way)… As discussed in the comments on on of my early posts, the statue may not be an Apollo; it may be a tray-bearer. Or is it nothing at all? As always, Paul Barford’s covering this as well as everything else, and he’s not certain about the corrosion. I wanted to note this immediately, but I’ll post more on it later.

The Apollo of Gaza: the origins of the origins story?

In the last post, I compared the fisherman’s – fishermen‘s – tale(s) of how (t)he(y) found the Gaza Apollo by accident (and I showed how one was an implausibly perfect mirror image of the other). The original investigator, Fabio Scuto, judged that his and re-investigator Vernon Silver’s ‘sources [we]re obviously different’.

In fact, the new story is even more perfectly counterposed to the old one than I’ve shown already. And the nature of the stories may explain why one is the opposite of the other. The origins of the stories may lie at the top(s) of the Palestinian state(s)…