Waxword

I travelled a very long way to get this photo of the rarest of antiquities. And it’s a fake. Therein lies a disturbing tale. This is the museum in Usak, a small city in central Turkey, which houses the treasures of King Croesus in 6th Century BC, a cache of 363 gold, silver and other…

Readers here may recall my mention of Libya asking for Italy to return a statue, and I wasn’t sure if it was voluntary or not on Italy’s part. Guess what: Not. Voluntary. The Art Newspaper has an amusing piece about how an Italian group is dragging its feet in returning the statue (pictured), despite an…

I’m doing something somewhat crazy – bussing it around the country. This is an education in itself. The bus system is well-organized and extremely civilized, designed for an evermore sophisticated populace. The bus I’m on is to Usak, a two-horse town in the middle of western Turkey, and it has movie service, and a server…

I’m posting this as a special request from a reader, who remembers with awe the Alexander sarcophagus in the Istanbul Archeological Museum. This piece is a wonder, found in Sidon, Lebanon in 1873 by Hamdi Osman, Turkey’s first archeologist. Alexander the Great is the figure at the far left, cape flying, horse rearing high, as…

ANTALYA — Domestic travel in Turkey, nation of 73 million, like in Egypt, a nation of similar size (80 million), is like a trip back in time in the United States, once upon an Osama. Imagine not having to stand in a security line a half-mile long to get to the plane, not to take…

Istanbul, city of dreams, capital of empires. You dig, you find. You find, you work. Beneath a plastic sheet creating sauna-like humidity, and misted by a length of constant sprinklers, archeologist Cemal Pulak, a Turkish-born professor at Texas A&M University, works on the find of a lifetime. When the city began digging a new, state-of-the-art…

This man looks rather fierce, but he is a frequent giggler– if you can get in to see him. Here’s today’s adventure in Ankara. I arrived at the offices of Orhan Duzgun (left), the general director of Turkey’s office of Cultural Assets and Museums. He’s the guy in charge of the museums and Turkey’s smuggling…

Ankara, what a big surprise. After the clanking, smoky chaos of Cairo, where the cars descend on one another in a cacophonous cascade, where every elegant building seems to be flanked by a slum and every swept sidewalk hides a garbage pile to its rear, Ankara feels like Switzerland. This sprawling city of 5 million…

Well, this may be a bit of a surprise to those following my journey in the Middle East. My last story before book leave appears in today’s Sunday Styles. It’s about Ron Boyer, aka Rod Fontana, porn star turning preacher. It says: "After 30 years of sowing the wildest of oats, Mr. Boyer, 54, has…

Heading to Turkey, to discover more about looted antiquities. Cairo teems below on a hazy Sunday morning. Last night the French embassy had its Bastille Day bash, 2,000 people in the garden of the embassy. A choir sang the French and Egyptian national anthems, there was disco music with throwback tunes (anyone remember "Life is…

We are diligently tracking down the origins of the masterpieces that Zahi Hawass wants to borrow, and eventually reclaim from Western museums. There is no legal claim to the statue taken from the pit where my archeologist guide, Essam, is crouching. This is the mausoleum, or mastaba, of Hamiunu, whose statue is now at a…

Hot news from Sofia, that’s in Bulgaria,  where officials are demanding that Greece return nine silver plates, dating back to the 12th century, illegally dug up and smuggled out of the country.(Here’s the story, from Sofia News Service, no kidding.) This entire enterprise begins to make the mind spin. Greece wants things back from England;…

Here it is, the famous ceiling of the zodiac at the Temple of Denderah, north of Luxor (in black). Except it isn’t. The real ceiling was hacked out of this space in the early part of the 19th century because of its extreme rarity: there are few (I’m told none, but I’d want to check)…

Apparently, cross-cultural love has become quite the thing in this tourist town on the Nile. The latest trend is retired English ladies taking up residence, and finding love with young Egyptian men. (I saw one such couple around midnight in the lobby of my hotel. She looked relaxed.) This is resulting in marriages and some…