Ethiopian crown, hidden for two decades, is returning home
A priceless 18thcentury Ethiopian crown is set to be returned from the Netherlands to Addis Ababa after a one-time refugee found it in a suitcase and hid it in his apartment for two decades.
The ornate gilded copper headgear, featuring images of Christ and the Twelve Apostles, was unearthed after refugee-turned-Dutch-citizen Sirak Asfaw contacted Dutch ‘art detective’ Arthur Brand.
Brand, dubbed the ‘Indiana Jones of the art world’ for his discoveries of missing works, said the crown would soon be handed to the Ethiopian authorities.
Sirak, a former Ethiopian refugee who today works as a management consultant for the Dutch government, fled the country during the late 1970s during the so-called ‘Red Terror’ purges.
Once settled in the Netherlands, Sirak used to receive a stream of Ethiopians, one of whom left it behind in a suitcase, which Sirak found in April 1998.
Sirak “did not want to return it to the same regime that had made it possible for the crown to get stolen”, so he decided to become the crown’s de facto guardian “until such time it could go back”.
For 21 years the crown was hidden in his apartment as Ethiopia continued to be ruled by an iron-fisted one-party government.
Sirak said however that when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office last year, he felt that things had changed sufficiently in Ethiopia to finally give the crown back.
Jacopo Gnisci, a research associate at Oxford University who also examined the artefact and confirmed its authenticity, said there were less than two dozen of these crowns, called “zewd”, in existence.
The last time the crown was seen in public, it was worn by a priest in a photograph taken in 1993 before it disappeared, said Gnisci. An investigation was launched at the time but the culprits were never found.
“These crowns are of priceless symbolic value and it is important that they be retuned to Ethiopia,” said Gnisci.