Ancient Treasures

by Brian Haughton

  The truth is that no one knows for sure (or is telling) where the treasure was before the end of 1980. According to the Hungarian version of events, the story begins in the town of Polgárdi, Fejér county, central-western Hungary. Sometime in 1978, a 22-year-old quarry worker named József Sümegh was carrying out excavation work at the stone quarry, which lies near the village of Kõszárhegy, northeast of Lake Balaton, when his shovel hit something metallic. When he investigated further he found a large, grime-encrusted copper vessel containing a hoard of silver objects, but due to the filth covering the artifacts, he didn’t realized the extraordinary nature of what he found. What Sümegh did next with the treasure is a mystery, though he may have hidden it in his family home in Polgárdi. Later Sümegh apparently took as many as six (accounts vary) of the objects to sell at the flea market near Budapest airport. Someone at the market seems to have realized the value of the objects, as they later turned up in Vienna, a center of the antiquities trade, in the possession of Halim Korban, a Lebanese antiquities dealer, and his partner, Anton Tkalec, a Yugoslav Serb coin dealer.

  A few months later Sümegh apparently left his job at the quarry and moved to Budapest. He returned home some weekends, but told his family little about his new life, though it was obvious from his expensive clothes that he had somehow come into money. At the beginning of 1979, Sümegh went to fulfill his national-service duty at the army barracks in Papa, to the northwest of Polgárdi. Around this time he is believed to have hidden the treasure in a hole in the floor of an old wine cellar close to Polgárdi. Years later, stories surfaced that Sümegh had shown the treasure to a few of his friends, some of whom had held and examined it; one, István Strasszer, described a heavy box decorated with birds on its top. Others stated that Sümegh had told them of finding a buried silver treasure that comprised about 200 pieces and that he had sold some pieces of the collection to a Lebanese dealer.

  Whatever the truth of these statements, in November 1980, a silver ewer from the treasure appeared in London, probably via Halim Korban, and was sold to a consortium called the Art Consultancy, which seems to have included Rainer Zietz, a German-born art and antiques dealer, and Peter Wilson, recently retired as chairman of Sotheby’s. Wilson was a colossal figure on the London art market and the center of a network of antiquities dealers. He was also, to say the least, an interesting character. Credited by many as the one person responsible for creating the modern Sotheby’s, during WWII Wilson was employed by MI6 with the code number “007,” where he became friendly with Ian Fleming, Navy Intelligence’s liaison officer with MI6. According to Wilson’s own story he was part of the inspiration for Fleming’s James Bond character. In his book, Sotheby’s: The Inside Story (Random House, Westminster, Md., 1997) author Peter Watson mentions that Wilson was also suspected of being a Soviet spy and that he retired as chairman of Sotheby’s soon after Sir Anthony Blunt, an art historian and former MI5 officer, was exposed as a member of the Cambridge Five, a group of Soviet spies working for the Soviet Union from 1934 to at least the early 1950s. This is an interesting theory, and Wilson did have connections with members of the Cambridge Five, though there is no direct evidence he was ever a Soviet spy.

  Be that as it may, Peter Wilson subsequently arranged to have the ewer from the treasure examined at the British Museum, where it was cleaned and revealed to be a rare and valuable piece of fourth- or fifth-century Roman silver. So as not to arouse suspicion Korban brought further objects from the treasure to London one or two at a time, and it seems these were bought by Peter Wilson and the Art Consultancy.

  At around the same time (December 1980), in Hungary, the body of József Sümegh was found hanging from the rafters of the disused wine cellar. The verdict was suicide. The treasure, which had apparently been buried close by, was gone, leaving only a hole in the ground. Throughout the next couple of months, two more of Sumegh’s friends were apparently found dead in the area. According to Peter Landesman in his 2001 Atlantic Monthly article on the Sevso case, one of Sumegh’s coworkers at the quarry had died after eating poisoned cheese, and another was found hanging by his neck in a forest. Were these deaths coincidences? The Hungarian police seemed to think so, as their investigations could not officially link the three deaths.

  However, in 1993 a prisoner named József Lelkes told a tabloid newspaper that József Sümegh had indeed discovered the Sevso Treasure and that three other people who knew of his discovery had died in mysterious circumstances. In 1990, a decade after the events, Bela Vukan, the police officer in charge of the Hungarian investigation into the Sevso Treasure, decided to follow up on local rumors that Sümegh’s death had not been suicide, but murder connected to the Sevso Treasure. Vukan carried out investigations into the supposed suicide and came to the conclusion that Sümegh could not have hanged himself with his military belt, as the official investigations had stated. Vukan believes that Sümegh was murdered and his body placed in the wine cellar to obscure the origins of the treasure.

  Peter Landesman’s Atlantic Monthly article also contained further sensational nuggets of information about Sümegh’s connection with the treasure. Landesman describes meeting Zoltan Fodelmesi, the principal of the local school, and a keen coin collector who often traded with József Sümegh. Fodelmesi told Landesman that Sümegh had shown him the treasure and that he (Fodelmesi) had advised the young man to take it to the National Museum in Budapest. Ominously Fodelmesi also confessed that even 20 years after seeing the mysterious Roman silver he was still afraid for his life. Knowledge of the treasure was a dangerous thing, he said. Landesman also mentions meeting József Sümegh’s younger step-brother Ishtevan, who informed him that together with József’s other step-brother, Attilla, they had helped clean one of the pieces of the treasure with sandpaper (!). Ishtevan also claimed that after József found the treasure he was visited by Russian and Hungarian officers, and that he believed that the military was connected with his half-brother’s death.

  The Sevso Treasure was meanwhile appearing in London piece by piece via Halim Korban and Anton Tkalec, and in 1981 Wilson and lawyer Peter Mimpriss (of the firm Allen & Overy) persuaded Spencer Compton, the Marquess of Northampton, to take part in the purchase as an investment through the Art Consultancy. Northampton was told that the Treasure would be far more valuable if complete, and so in the early years of the 1980s he spent around $16 million acquiring what he believed to be the full set.

  Northampton’s plan was to resell the silver later through the agency of Peter Wilson. He told police in 1990 that he was unaware of its exact origin, but believed Korban and Tkalec when they told him that it had been found in the Tyre and Sidon regions of Lebanon. By 1983, the year of Wilson’s death, Northampton had obtained 10 pieces of the treasure and offered them for sale to the wealthiest museum in the world, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for $10 million. However, when the Getty examined the Lebanese export certificates accompanying the silver it found them to be fake. Seemingly unperturbed by this, Peter Mimpriss, by now Northampton’s lawyer, arranged for new Lebanese documents, via his agent in Beirut, Ramiz Rizk. But the Getty naturally became suspicious and backed out of the deal.

  Throughout the next few years Northampton acquired four more pieces of the treasure and by 1990 was the sole owner of the entire 14-piece collection. At a news conference in New York in February of the same year, Sotheby’s announced the existence of a fabulous silver treasure worth $70 million that had been found in the 1970s in “what was once the province of Phoenicia in the Eastern Roman Empire”1 (in other words, modern Lebanon). According to Sotheby’s, the Lebanese Embassy in Switzerland had authenticated the licenses used to export the treasure from Lebanon. On February 9, 1990, London newspaper The Independent published a number of articles about the Sotheby’s auction, which stated that, although the provenance was uncertain, the Sevso hoard was believed to have been found in either Lebanon or Eastern Europe. Soon after, on February 14th, Sotheby’s put the treasure on display in New York,
in preparation for a proposed auction in Switzerland. But before the auction was announced, Sotheby’s had notified the 29 countries whose territory had once lain within the borders of the Roman Empire of the impending sale of the Sevso Treasure, inquiring whether the pieces were recorded as stolen property. This is when the trouble started. On February 15th the Republic of Lebanon put in a demand for the return of the treasure, followed by claims from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (soon to become Croatia) and, almost a year later, Hungary.

  Prolonged legal proceedings followed, as each country carried out extensive investigations into the treasure and attempted to uncover evidence that the valuable silver had been in fact discovered in its territory. However, before the case came to trial, Lebanon withdrew its claim, mainly because of the fake Lebanese export licenses. Finally, in November 1993, the New York Court of Appeals rejected the claims of both Hungary and Croatia, finding them “without merit,” and ruled that the tainted silver should be returned to the Marquess of Northampton.

  If the Marquess was the innocent dupe in the Sevso affair he has always claimed to be, then it is obvious that his legal advisors at the time, Allen & Overy, were not looking out for his interests. Left with a priceless yet unsalable collection of Roman silver, in 1999 Northampton decided to sue Mr. Mimpriss and his London law firm, Allen & Overy, for damages in relation to the advice they gave him during the purchase of the silver, charging them with “fraud and conspiracy to defraud.”2 The case was eventually settled out of court, with the Marquess receiving a reported $28 million in compensation.

  After the court case nothing was heard of the Sevso Treasure until September 2006, when Bonham’s announced a private exhibition of the pieces to take place on October 17th of that year. Rumors were that the Marquess was again trying to offload the silver, and indeed he was quoted by the online version of the English newspaper The Guardian on October 17, 2006, as saying he “hopes” the Sevso Treasure will be sold, and that it has “cursed” his family.3 But putting the treasure back in the public eye did not attract the buyer Northampton hoped for; instead it brought a renewed claim of ownership from Hungary in the form of a letter from its Ministry of Education and Culture. The letter stated that the treasure could not be sold, as it was the property of the Hungarian state, and that Hungary “maintain[s] our claim of title to it and will take all possible legal measures pursuant to this.”4 The matter of the Sevso Treasure was even brought up in the House of Lords, in answer to searching questions about the Bonhams exhibition put by Colin Renfrew, Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, a prominent archaeologist and senior fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge, UK. Nevertheless, the exhibition went ahead, and although the Sevso Treasure was not sold, no legal claim to ownership was made by Hungary.

  But does Hungary—or, for that matter, Croatia—have a legitimate claim to the Sevso Treasure?

  Croatia’s claim to the treasure was partly based upon information given by phone to a journalist named David Keys, who worked for The Independent newspaper. Keys would not reveal his source, but in March 1990 The Independent ran a story that stated that the treasure had been discovered in the 1970s by Yugoslav troops at a military instillation near the town of Pula, on the southern tip of the Istrian Peninsula in what is now Croatia. The silver had then been smuggled out of the country in a diplomatic pouch. At the New York trial Yugoslavia produced allegedly eyewitness testimony to support its claim to the treasure in the form of Anton Cvek, a retired secret policeman from Pula. Cvek testified that in May 1961 he had seen pieces of the Sevso Treasure at a military base near the village of Barbariga, around 13 1/2 miles northwest of Pula. He also stated that he had seen further pieces at a house in Barbariga the same day. Cvek’s testimony was supported by another retired secret policeman from Pula called Ivan Kauric, who stated that he been with Cvek at Barbariga and had also seen the treasure.

  Unfortunately for the Yugoslav/Croatian claim, it was later revealed that Kauric had changed his story a number of times. For example, when interviewed by Croatian authorities on three separate occasions between 1990 and 1992, he had repeatedly stated that he had no knowledge of any silver treasure from Barbariga. Cvek also later stated that he was not sure if the silver in Barbariga was actually the Sevso Treasure. But Cvek’s greatest inconsistency was his description of the silver plates that he had seen as the size of dinner plates—obviously much smaller than the huge examples in the Sevso hoard. In June 1991, a report by the Croatian Ministry of Internal Affairs admitted that, after a lengthy investigation, it could find no evidence that the Sevso Treasure had been found in Yugoslav/Croatian territory.

  Hungary appears to have a much more watertight claim on the Sevso Treasure. Retired detective sergeant Richard Ellis, formerly with Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad, who carried out extensive investigations into the provenance of the silver, believes the Hungarians have the strongest case. Indeed, there appears to be a substantial amount of hard evidence for the legitimacy of the Hungarians claim. One piece of this evidence appears on the central medallion of the Hunting Plate from the collection, in the form of an inscription bearing the word “Pelso,” next to a body of water. Pelso is the Roman name for Lake Balaton, just a few miles away from where József Sümegh supposedly discovered the treasure. Another link with the Sevso Treasure is an exquisitely decorated silver tripod, in Hungary’s National Museum in Budapest, interpreted by Hungarian archaeologists as a folding table (called a quadruped). This object was found in 1878 near Polgárdi, and Zsolt Mrav of Hungary’s National Museum is convinced that there is a close connection between the quadruped and the Sevso Treasure, due to similarities in decoration and date. (The object is thought to date to the middle/second half of the fourth century AD.)

  Scientific evidence also seems to support Hungary as the provenance of the treasure. In her article “Contributions to the Archaeology of the Seuso Treasure” (in Antiquaries Journal) Dr. Zsolt Visy states that mineralogical analysis using electron microscopy of soil samples taken from the Meleager Plate matched soils in the area of the village of Szabadbattyán, 18.6 miles from Lake Balaton. Furthermore, Dr. Visy states, X-Ray Diffraction Analysis of the soil encrustations on the copper cauldron that contained the treasure and soil taken from the pit in the wine cellar showed that they had the same mineral composition. Therefore, he reasons, they can be considered as materials from the same soil environment. In the same article Dr. Visy refers to a definite connection between József Sümegh’s discovery of the Sevso Treasure and his murder in the wine cellar. Hungary’s use of the soil samples from the wine cellar and József Sümegh’s murder in support of its claim to the Sevso Treasure are of vital importance, and we will return to them later.

  The majority of the evidence for the Hungarian case was presented in a Channel 4 (UK) special edition of their popular archaeology TV show Time Team. The show, entitled “The Mystery of the Roman Silver,” aired in December 2008 and contained interviews with many of the major players in the Sevso drama, though not Lord Northampton, and the show was not allowed to film the treasure itself, which was then held in a vault at Bonhams in London.

  If the treasure did originate in Hungary, what was its history and why was it buried? Dr. Visy believes that in light of the apparent reference to Lake Balaton on the Hunting Plate, the discovery of the Roman quadripod near Polgárdi, and the results of the soils sampling, Sevso must have been the wealthy owner of one of the large Roman villas located around the shores of the Lake. Dr. Visy suggests the villa in question was the huge example near the town of Szabadbattyán (from where the soil samples were taken). Excavations at the villa site in the 1990s revealed traces of burning and destruction, dating to around the end of the fourth century, which could be interpreted as signs of an attack, possibly by barbarian invaders. Could the Sevso Treasure have come from this villa and have been concealed at the time of this attack, to be unearthed 1,600 or so years later by József Sümegh? This scenario certainly sounds plausible.


  However, not everyone is convinced by the evidence put forward by Hungary in support of its claim. In terms of the “Pelso” inscription on the central medallion of the Hunting Plate, Dr. Marlia Mango notes that another neighboring inscription reads “IN(N) OCENTIUS,” probably the name of the horse illustrated next to it. The “PELSO,” inscription, Dr. Mango believes, may relate to the dog seated above the inscription, rather than the water illustrated, which appears more like a river or stream than a lake.

  There are also questions surrounding the soil sample evidence that seemingly puts the origins of the Sevso Treasure in Hungary. At the 1993 New York trial both Croatia and Hungary were asked to provide soil samples from various parts of their countries to establish whether their soil matched ancient encrustations found on pieces of the treasure. Due to the fact that Croatia delayed its submissions and constantly changed the samples it wished to submit, it was forbidden by the court from using them to support its claim. The court came to the same decision about Hungary, prohibiting it from using a soil sample from the wine cellar where the treasure was allegedly kept. Why was this? At the trial, police officer Bela Vukan admitted that there were no witnesses who claimed to have seen the treasure in the wine cellar. Much more seriously for the Hungarian case was the fact that the former owner of the cellar told the Hungarian authorities that the indentation in the floor of the cellar was in fact where a wine vat had been placed for many years. This is interesting, as in the 2008 Time Team show about the treasure, Bela Vukan still pointed out the indentation in the wine cellar as the place where the cauldron containing the silver had once been hidden.

  In fact, when Dr. Anna Bennett of the Conservation and Technical Services carried out analysis of the encrustation on the cauldron, the results showed that it had not been buried in the earth at all, but concealed in a limestone environment, such as a natural cave or a chamber.