De schatten van de Krim

Initially, the works of art and antique weapons loaned from regional museums in Crimea for the travelling exhibition “Crimea – Gold and Secrets of the Black Sea” disappear into the museum’s basement in Amsterdam. A legal tug-of-war begins; both Ukraine and the Crimean museums insist that the artefacts are part of "their" cultural heritage. Valentina Mordvintseva, archaeologist and curator of the Crimean museums, and Ludmila Strokova, director of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine, dispute whether the excavations are matters of regional or national cultural heritage. With each exchange of ideas and each new argument in the litigation that follows the case becomes more complex. While museum directors complain about gaps in their collections, Dutch courtrooms go beyond mere questions of ownership. Instead, they are also interested in whose cultural identity the archaeological finds, ones that were made long before the founding of today's nation states, belong to: Ukrainian, Russian, regional, supranational?


Glad-House/Obenkino: Original version with english subtitles