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September 30th, 2012

Turkey has asked for the return of what it calls cultural patrimony, sparking international debate about who owns antiquities after centuries of shifting borders. Major museums such as The Met, The Getty, The Louvre and The Pergamon in Berlin are being asked to return works from their collections to Turkey under a 1906 Ottoman law that banned the export of artifacts, even though Turkey ratified the Unesco convention in 1981, which allows museums to acquire objects that were outside their countries of origin before 1970.Read the full article via The New York Times