Few nations embody this paradox more than Armenia.
Across Europe and North America, Armenian artifacts — cross-stones, manuscripts, carpets, jewelry — are displayed as fragments of a vanished world. These objects are celebrated for their beauty but stripped of their histories of loss.
This article shows two of them in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
A khachkar removed from a destroyed church in Van or Moush is no longer a living memorial but a decorative relic.
A rug woven in Shushi becomes an “oriental textile,” detached from the hands that made it and the streets that once carried its colors.
Armenia’s predicament is part of a broader struggle among colonized and dispossessed peoples to reclaim their heritage.
Across Africa, the Caribbean and Indigenous North America, activists are demanding the return of objects stolen during conquest.
The Benin Bronzes — thousands of sculptures looted by British troops in 1897 — have become symbols of this global movement.
Following sustained pressure and the influential Savoy-Sarr Report, France agreed in 2021 to return several dozen artifacts to Benin. Yet, such gestures are the exception rather than the norm.
Most Western museums resist full restitution, offering only “loans” or “shared custody” arrangements that preserve their ownership.
