The family of an Ethiopian war hero, Ras Desta Damtew, is seeking to recover his gold star medal, after it surfaced at an online auction with a catalogue entry indicating it was stolen from him when he was captured and executed in 1937.
The medal is listed on the platform liveauctioneers.com as a Breast Star of the Order, offered by a company called La Galerie Numismatique, which, according to its website, has stores in Bucharest, Lausanne and Paris.
With an estimated value of between €60,000 and €90,000, the medal “comes from the estate of an Italian soldier who was present at the capture of the Prince,” according to the catalogue entry. Offered in an online auction on 1 December, it failed to sell for the minimum asking price of €48,000. La Galerie Numismatique did not respond to two emails from The Art Newspaper asking for information about the sale.
“It’s literally a medal taken from the dead body of our grandfather,” says Amaha Kassa, Desta’s grandson, who lives in the United States. Reading the catalogue entry “made our blood boil”, he says.
Laly Kassa, Desta’s US-based granddaughter, says “the world needs to know that keeping the spoils from these times will not go unnoticed, and even more, that to hype up this provenance for a profit is completely unacceptable”. The grandchildren are hoping to secure the medal for an Ethiopian museum.
Desta Damtew was described in his obituary in The Times on 27 February, 1937, as “the most able of the great Ethiopian Rases,” or military commanders, and “a favourite of the emperor Haile Selassie”. A hospital in Addis Ababa is named after him. As the commander of the southern front against the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini’s invading troops, Desta continued his campaign in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, long after Selassie went into exile to try to fight Ethiopia’s case at the League of Nations.
“The Italian force looted countless objects and artefacts during the war and occupation,” says Yemane Demissie, a professor of film and television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and the director of a film about Selassie. “This is known because many of them have surfaced in Italian museums and in private Italian collections.”
Desta’s grandchildren are represented by Christopher Marinello, a lawyer and the founder of Art Recovery International, which tracks missing art. Marinello contacted La Galerie Numismatique before the auction asking it to withdraw the medal from sale and facilitate negotiations between the family and the consignor. In response, Bogdan Stambuliu, who described himself as the auctioneer, wrote in an email that the medal had been sold several times since 1936 and “the provenance is clear and we will not ask the consigner to stop the sale.” The auction house said it and the consignor would be willing to sell the medal to the family for a total of €61,595, including VAT and buyer’s premium.
“These are outrageous, insensitive demands for stolen property with colonial-era provenance,” Marinello says.
Abebaw Ayalew, the director general of the Ethiopian Heritage Authority, also wrote to La Galerie Numismatique before the auction requesting the cancellation of the sale and “that you contact the sellers to arrange for the return of this important looted heritage item to Ethiopia.”
