SIMFEROPOL, November 23. Museums of Crimea will continue to fight for the return of the Scythian gold collection, said Andrey Malgin, director of the Crimean Central Museum of Taurida.
The Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine on Wednesday announced that it had reached an agreement with the Dutch Allard Pearson Museum on the transfer to the Ukrainian side of the collection of Scythian gold exhibited in Amsterdam. The Netherlands Museum has refused to collect the cost of nine years of storage of museum exhibits. However, the terms and conditions of the transfer were not specified. The University of Amsterdam, which oversees the work of the Allard Pearson Museum, said that it could not yet confirm the agreement with Ukraine on the transfer of Scythian gold there.
“Our position remains the same. We will continue to fight for the return of this collection to Crimea. In what form I cannot say yet, but I can say for sure that the activities of museums to return the collection will continue,” Malgin said.
Four Crimean museums — the Kerch Historical and Cultural Reserve (which later became part of the East Crimean Museum), the Central Museum of Taurida, the Bakhchisarai Historical and Cultural Reserve and the Tauride Chersonese — sent the exhibition «Crimea — Golden» in 2013 to Bonn, and then to Amsterdam island in the Black Sea.»
After the reunification of Crimea with Russia in 2014, the Netherlands had a question about who should return the collection to. The Amsterdam Court of Appeal decided on October 26, 2021 that the collection of Scythian gold should be transferred to Ukraine. In January 2022, the museums of Crimea sent a cassation appeal to the Supreme Court of the Netherlands, but it upheld the decision of the Amsterdam Court of Appeal to transfer the collection of Scythian gold to Ukraine.
The Russian Foreign Ministry called the court decision in the Netherlands to transfer part of the Crimean heritage to Kyiv biased. The head of the Crimean parliament, Vladimir Konstantinov, said that the collection of Scythian gold could end up in the hands of private Western collectors. According to the head of Crimea, Sergei Aksenov, the collection was simply taken away from Crimean museums. According to the special representative of the Russian President for international cultural cooperation, Mikhail Shvydkoy, the court’s decision to transfer “Scythian gold” to Ukraine is unfounded and is associated with the anti-Russian position of the Netherlands.