A temporary exhibition dealing with one of the most contemporary and sensitive issues and showcasing stolen artifacts that have been reacquired, titled "End to Antiquities Trafficking", is scheduled to open in April and run through September at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. A total of 170 artifacts from the Museum's collections, the 6th and 7th Ephorates of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities and the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities will be on display in the six sections of the exhibition, as well as archive material from the culture and tourism ministry's protection of cultural treasures directorate. The first section, titled "The Abduction of History", will feature a review of antiquities smuggling and illegal trafficking of cultural treasures from antiquity to the present, with the display of 101 artifacts of recent antiquities smuggling from Macedonia, coming most likely from an Archaic period cemetery. The showcase exhibits of the second section, titled "Antiquities without a Past", will be two stolen and retrieved gold wreaths: a golden wreath from a Thessaloniki Aristotelion University (AUTH) excavation at the Vergina archaeological site which will be on loan from the Archaeological Museum of Pella and a golden funerary wreath returned by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2007. Finally, the third section, titled "Lands without History", will feature five stolen Cycladic statuettes now in the Thessaloniki Archaeology Museum's collections. (AMNA)
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