Nazlan Ertan, writing for Al-Monitor, reports on the repatriation of 83 Late Roman Imperial coins struck at Anatolian Mints, under a 2021 Cultural Property Agreement (CPA) between the United States and Turkey. See Nazlan Ertan, Turkey boasts of antiquities' return, but faces scrutiny at home, Al Monitor (October 4, 2025), available at https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2025/10/turkey-boasts-antiquities-return-faces-scrutiny-home (last visited October 16, 2025).
Ertan quotes Deputy Culture and Tourism Minister Gokhan
Yazgi as stating, “The process was swift, transparent and efficient.” The article then goes onto to portray the authoritarian
government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as using “repatriation victories
to project cultural authority abroad, an arena in which Turkey currently leads.”
While the article also criticizes government mismanagement and the influence of short term political and commercial interests, Ertan completely ignores the serious critique of both Erdogan’s policies and the CPA levelled by representatives of the trade, collectors and minority religious and ethnic groups at a recent U.S. State Department Cultural Property Advisory Committee meeting convened to discuss the CPA’s renewal.
Indeed, the news of the repatriation of these Roman Imperial coins highlights these problems, at least for coin collectors. First, it is unclear how the 2021 CPA and its implementing regulations can retroactively justify a seizure that took place in 2015, some six years earlier. Second, it is highly questionable that the Roman Imperial coins that were seized are even subject to the import restrictions that implement the CPA. Those regulations apply to Roman provincial coins, but not to Roman Imperial coins, which circulated well beyond the confines of modern-day Turkey as far as England in the West and Sri Lanka to the East. Certainly, one cannot assume that such coins were found in Turkey, a prerequisite for them to be restricted under the governing statute, the Cultural Property Implementation Act.
As it is, this looks like yet another case where the U.S. State Department and U.S. law enforcement have prioritized “cultural diplomacy” over due process rights for American citizens. As such, this seizure represents yet another reason for Congress to pass HR 595, a bill to protect coin collectors, as well as far more ambitious reform legislation to protect the private property rights of American citizens.
