DESPRE COLECȚII ȘI COLECȚIONARI. UN CAZ ATIPIC (I)
ABOUT COLLECTIONS AND COLLECTORS. AN ATYPICAL CASE (I)

Summary/Abstract: During the judicial actions, generically known as the Dacian Gold Files, the investigators faced, very often, incredibly unusual situations, unexpected, even paradoxical, which accumulated aspects that showed the absurd and the ludicrous, but which, in the last instance, describe, in an inspired way, we can say, details of the structure of the individual and collective mind of those involved in trafficking the cultural assets, stolen from archaeological sites. The herby study wants to bring to the attention of the public interested in the issue of national cultural heritage that has been subject to financially motivated criminal acts (theft, trafficking), in particular the problem of “occasional” collections and collectors which appeared in the Romanian landscape in early 2000s, a unique case, located in Hunedoara County, atypical at first sight, but symptomatic for that period. We also focus on an aspect frequently observed in the case of antique markets, namely on the so-called gray market. It is named the grey market because it is perceived as being between the black, obviously illegal and the white, legal market. The cultural assets, likely to belong to the cultural heritage, stolen from their original contexts, represent new entries, previously unknown to the experts, not taken into account in previous records or inventories. The interfaces through which they are sold are the gray market, illustrated in figure 22. The private collections, designed in the turbulent years after 1989, not mentioned in the records of the public institutions (impossible due to their illegality), represent today, the intermediaries, or the vehicles, between the black and the white markets.

• Details
• Contents