Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• A bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius has been returned to Türkiye after years on display in Cleveland, Ohio following an illegal artifact heist.
• The statue has been the subject of a decades-long ownership debate, which was finally resolved through the intervention of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations.
• To verify Türkiye's claim to the statue, officials had to scratch at dirt buried in the statue with their fingernails in order to obtain soil samples.

This story is a collaboration with Biography.com.

Recovering stolen artifacts isn’t easy work. There’s research involved, legal red tape to contend with. To do that job, sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.

In this case, literally.

As reported by Türkiye Today, in 2025, a statue of Marcus Aurelius—a Roman emperor whose Meditations have endured as one of the most widely studied philosophical texts—was finally repatriated back to Türkiye after a lengthy saga that started back in the 1960s.

In 1967, the statue was taken from the city of Boubon in southwestern Türkiye as part of an illegal excavation, leaving behind only the pedestal upon which it once stood. The headless bronze sculpture then changed hands and travelled far, taking the Philosopher Emperor from Anatolia all the way to America—specifically, Ohio. Ultimately, it was placed on display at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Jale İnan, the scholar who first flagged the stolen artifact in a public fashion, published an article that identified the statue as being the one taken from the Boubon site.

Museum studies scholar Elizabeth Marlowe told the website Hyperallergic that “it was [İnan’s] publications, starting in 1979, that tied the thefts at Boubon to the statues that were circulating on the American market, including this Philosopher statue,” and noted that “for the 19 years that the statue was on the market […] but there’s a reason none of those other museums had been willing to risk buying it” until the acquisition by the Cleveland Museum of Art.

For their part, the Cleveland Museum of Art noted on a plaque, during the statue’s final display, that it “had been publicly exhibited in several other institutions in the United States, the seller claimed to be its rightful owner, and the reported modern history of the sculpture met the CMA standards for acquisition.”

But a scholarly article isn’t the same as irrefutable proof, and government requests for something to be returned (dating back to at least 2012) aren’t always enough to compel an institution to comply.

It took the involvement of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigations for the effort to gain any traction. In 2021, these two organizations launched an investigation in tandem with Türkiye’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism to try and recover the artifacts which had been absconded from Boubon—including the Aurelius statue.

“Through extensive archival research, witness testimony from the 1967 looting, and precise comparisons between the statue’s foot measurements and its original base in Boubon’s Sebasteion structure,” Türkiye Today noted, “[…] the team gathered strong evidence. The discovery of similar sandal designs during excavations at nearby Kybra reinforced Türkiye’s claim.”

However, this did not end the dispute. When, in 2023, the New York Supreme Court allowed the statue to be seized, the Cleveland Museum of Art fought back, challenging the Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s claim to the artwork. Now, the claim had to be substantiated beyond the realm of scholarship and archival research—it needed to be subjected to scientific testing, including “geochemical tests conducted at Germany’s Curt Engelhorn Archaeometry Center.”

Soil samples needed to be collected from the statue itself—a challenging proposition for an ancient artifact. You might expect there to be some piece of high-tech equipment that could be employed to extract the sample. But in fact, as Department of Combatting Smuggling head Zeynep Boz described, they actually relied on the oldest tool in mankind’s arsenal: “It was a moment where we had to rely on instinct. We dug with our fingernails to extract the soil.”

“Laboratory tests confirmed that the soil inside the Marcus Aurelius statue matched that found in another statue seized in 1967 and now housed in the Burdur Museum,” writes Türkiye Today.

But a fingernail scratch wasn’t the only surprising method employed to try and ascertain, to the satisfaction of all parties, the origin of the Aurelius statue. There was also a bit of a Cinderella element at play, as experts from the ministry made a silicon mold of the statue’s foot and brought it back to Boubon to see if it fit the base they believed the carving once stood upon. Indeed, they had a match.

On Valentine’s Day 2025, the office for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. announced that the Cleveland Museum of Art had withdrawn its case and agreed to return the statue. Bragg stated that the resolution of this dispute was “illustrative of how we can work together to ensure that looted antiquities are in the possession of [their] rightful owners.”

The press release also noted that the statue was one of 15 artifacts of Boubon origin seized by the D.A.’s Office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which were “collectively valued at almost $80 million.”

Now, finally, the Marcus Aurelius statue has been returned to its country of origin, in what the Ministry described as “a milestone in the country’s fight against the trafficking of cultural property.”