Bulgarian Dugup Coin Seizure: The View from Washington

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The United States of America including Wisconsin and Washington D.C. are a state party of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Yet we have an authoritative statement from a Washington cultural property lawyer, member of the board of directors of the Cultural Property Research Institute:

"The US will only honor Bulgarian export controls if a MOU with Bulgaria is approved". 

There you are culture criminals and smugglers, carte blanche from Washington, just label the packages up properly (correct place of origin, proper value) and Bob's your uncle, a massive antiquities market open for you, thousands of dollars to be made, but then you knew that already didn't you? As Nathan Elkins has shown in several recent papers, the US ancient coin market today thrives largely because of the vast numbers of coins coming out of Bulgaria and the neighbouring regions that have been flooding into the USA since the early 1990s. It is no secret, even Ancient Coins for Education tell us "The vast majority of uncleaned material on the market at the present time [used in the project] comes from Eastern Europe - the "countries formerly known as Yugoslavia" and Bulgaria in particular". A number of US dealers have made a lot of money from this segment of the trade, the US inland revenue has been getting its cut from some of them. US collectors have been able to satisfy their acquisitive urges and quest for bragging rights by building up large collections of dugup ancient and Medieval hammered coins from these regions at reasonable cost.

"The US will only honor Bulgarian export controls if a MOU with Bulgaria is approved", but of course there are a number of people who are very interested in such an MOU not being signed, and keeping the US ignoring Bulgarian export controls on dugup antiquities. And that is what they call a "legitimate market"!