Hundreds of ancient artifacts from Crimea that were stored in a Dutch museum for nine years while Russia and Ukraine waged a legal battle over their ownership are now back in Ukraine, officials in Amsterdam said on Monday. The works arrived on Sunday at the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine in Kyiv, said officials at the Allard Pierson Museum, an archaeological museum at the University of Amsterdam, which borrowed around 400 works from four Crimean museums in 2014 for the exhibition “Crimea: Gold and Secrets of the Black Sea.” The artifacts included gold jewelry, gold plaques, precious gems, Greek and Roman stone ornaments and ceramics. A month into the show’s run, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, and when it came time to send the objects back, a legal conflict emerged: Should they go back to the Crimean museums, now under Russian state control, or to Ukraine, which argued that the works were part of its national heritage? The nine-year struggle over the treasures became a kind of proxy war over national sovereignty and cultural property. Els van der Plas, the director of the Allard Pierson Museum, said in a statement that it was “a special case in which cultural heritage became a victim of geopolitical developments.”

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Persons: Allard Pierson, Els van der Plas Organizations: Museum, Historical, Allard, Allard Pierson Museum, University of Amsterdam Locations: Crimea, Russia, Ukraine, Amsterdam, Kyiv, Crimean