An ancient bronze griffin’s head returns to the same museum in ancient Olympia from where it was stolen in the 1930s, today, March 21, almost a month after The Metropolitan Museum of Art returned it to Greece.
The 7th-century BC artifact will be handed back to the Archaeological Museum of ancient Olympia on Friday evening during an official ceremony, in the presence of Greece’s Culture Minister, Lina Mendoni.
The restitution of the ancient artifact took place on February 24 at a ceremony in New York, where Mendoni officially received the bronze head of the mythological creature and its legal title from Met Director Max Hollein. The object will be loaned back to the Met for an exhibition at the museum in late 2026.
During the ceremony, Mendoni noted that this repatriation is especially noteworthy because it was not a result of a formal restitution claim by Greek authorities but instead is based on a 2018 initiative by The Met to investigate the origin of the griffin head.
In his remarks, Sean Hemingway, Curator in Charge of Greek and Roman Art at The Met, noted that while there are hundreds of archaic bronze griffins’ heads from cauldrons that are known “this one is one of the largest and the finest in existence.”
The cast-bronze piece was discovered in Olympia in the Peloponnese in 1914 and was acquired by the Joseph Brummer Gallery in 1936 from an Athens dealer. It was bequeathed to the Met in 1972 by Walter C. Baker, a financier, art collector and former Met trustee, who had in turn bought from the Brummer Gallery in New York in 1948. It had since been on permanent display, moving to the entrance of the museum’s Greek and Roman galleries in 1999. Met researchers had concluded the griffin’s head had been likely illegally removed from the Archaeological Museum of Olympia in the 1930s, though details of the removal aren’t known.
The Greek Ministry of Culture provided documentation detailing how the artifact was found in 1914 in the Kaledeos riverbed in Olympia by Themistoklis Karachalios, the local archaeological museum’s curator. It was stored in the museum’s library but was not properly recorded before it disappeared in the 1930s. Surviving documentation reviewed by both the Greek Culture Ministry and the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows it could not have left the museum’s premises legitimately.
According to a statement by the Met, the research “revealed that the theft of the object occurred under the watch of the head of the Archaeological Museum of Olympia, for which he was referred for criminal prosecution over 80 years ago.”
