Spirited away

An investigation identified hundreds of artefacts in New York's celebrated Metropolitan Museum of Art linked to indicted or convicted traffickers. What does this mean for the future of museums?

- SPENCER WOODMAN, MALIA POLITZER, DELPHINE REUTER AND NAMRATA SHARMA

In the village of Bungmati, Nepal, above an ancient spring, stand two stone shrines and a temple. On the side of one of those shrines is a large hole where a statue of Shreedhar Vishnu, the Hindu protector god, used to be.

Carved by master artisans nearly a thousand years ago, the sandstone relic was carefully tended and worshipped by local people. Sometime in the early 1980s that tradition abruptly ended when thieves removed the 50cm statue. Buddha Ratna Tuladhar, who lives in Bungmati, recalls how the community was "overwhelmed by melancholy" over its loss. "We kept hoping the statue would be restored, but it never was," he said.

About a decade after the theft, and on the other side of the world, a wealthy American collector donated the statue to New York City's celebrated Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it would remain for nearly 30 years, until an anonymous Facebook account called the Lost Arts of Nepal finally identified it in 2021. Although the Met has since removed the statue from its publicly listed collection, signalling that it may soon be returned, the damage to the Bungmati community was already done.

"Nepal has a living religion where these idols are actively worshipped in temples. People pray to them and take them out during festivals for ceremonies," said Roshan Mishra, a volunteer with the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign. "When relics are stolen, those festivals stop. Each stolen statue erodes our culture. Our traditions fade and are eventually forgotten."