Piotr Gliński showcased the recently recovered artefacts at a news conference in Warsaw, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency reported.
These include a manuscript entitled An Anthology of Turkish Poetry, stolen from the University Library in the southwestern Polish city of Wrocław.
“The manuscript was located by University Library employees on the antique art market in Vienna,” Gliński told reporters.
Meanwhile, a drawing by Melchior Steidl, The Ascension of Saint Mary (1704), has been reclaimed “thanks to cooperation between Poland’s culture ministry and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Gliński said.
The drawing was stolen from a private collection in Warsaw in 2005, according to officials.
Gliński also unveiled eight valuable coins, dating from the 16th to 19th centuries, which he said were stolen from a museum in the north-central city of Toruń between 2008 and 2017.
These artefacts have been recovered thanks to cooperation with police, prosecutors and rare coin experts, as well as “one of Europe’s biggest auction houses,” the culture minister said.
Gliński told reporters that “in recent years, the Polish Ministry of Culture has successfully recovered some 700 artefacts, including items looted during World War II and those stolen more recently, after discovering them in various places around the world.”
He added that the government would "continue to seek to reclaim stolen art given that Poland lost over half a million valuable artworks at the hands of the German and Russian occupiers" during World War II and in its aftermath, as well as in subsequent years, state news agency PAP reported.
The Polish culture minister was accompanied at Monday’s news conference by Daniel Lawton, the Deputy Chief of Mission at the US embassy in Warsaw.
Lawton congratulated Poland’s government on recovering Steidl’s The Ascension of Saint Mary, saying the work reflected “strong cooperation” with the FBI, the PAP news agency reported.
(pm/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP