by Gary Vikan
A final note on the TV debates. The strangest of them had about twenty of us seated in tiered rows being collectively interviewed by a Georgian version of the guy that hosted the TV show of the ’60s and ’70s called Let’s Make a Deal. I was in the front row, and there were academics, clerical types, curators, and all three of our director-collaborators beside and behind me. I could not tell who was who, but I certainly didn’t feel a whole lot of warmth. What really struck me, though, was that a curator from the Georgian State Art Museum up there behind me was energetically impugning the integrity and motives of his boss, Nodari Loumuri, who was somewhere between us. This was on live TV, to the whole nation. And I wondered: what happens at work the next day.
How did I imagine this was all going to play out? There would be no vote, of course, and I could only hope that another issue of national significance would arise and push the Georgian National Exhibition off the front pages of the newspapers and out of people’s minds. We would then all move on, grudgingly, and the show could go forward—which would make this week of browbeating in Tbilisi an exercise in dues-paying. But we were wondering what if the controversy didn’t go away—if it got worse and if someone got hurt. This was not at all an impossibility. I wondered if things were no better in September when it was time to ship the art to Baltimore, would President Shevardnadze have the power and the will to trump all this nonsense and make the show happen?
The patriarch, I felt, was the key. He was more than the voice for the opposition; he was its moral authority. After all, there was almost no conversation about the ancient material, about its condition and the prospect that copies would be sent back. It was all about the medieval works that are, of course, all Christian. We were caught in the middle between two powerful men, one representing a secular future and the West and the other an Orthodox past and the East.
So it was a big moment, and a ray of hope, when Greg Guroff received word from the American embassy that Patriarch Ilia II wanted to meet with us. The showdown came in a late-night audience at his residence in the Old Quarter of Tbilisi. We arrived with the US Deputy Chief of Mission in his black SUV with a motorcycle escort. It was just before 9:00 p.m. when we were ushered into a grand audience chamber with eight great throne-like chairs arranged in a “V,” converging on a huge textile icon of Christ’s “Holy Face” (Georgia’s version of the Veronica Veil), which was protected behind thick greenish glass in a sturdy brass case. Above, in the open section of the V, hung an enormous Venetian chandelier. The effect of this arrangement was that Christ himself was presiding as chair of the meeting. Patriarch Ilia II sat just to the right of Christ; he was dressed in long black robes and wore a truncated conical burgundy hat with a diamond cross at its center. I was on the left flank of the V, the second in line after the deputy and before Greg Guroff and the embassy’s head USIA officer, who had nothing but disdain for academics and little enthusiasm for our show.
The protocol of speech making went down the left flank and then up the right flank, toward Christ. This meant that I was second to speak, and the patriarch would be last. For well over an hour the patriarch said almost nothing, as Greg Guroff and I, with the help of the Deputy Chief of Mission and members of the Georgian Academy, laid out the case for the exhibition. As was customary by then, Greg and I spoke passionately of our love for all things Georgian, of our great admiration for Georgian art in particular, and of the professionalism of those Georgians tasked with caring for it. We promised that we would bring their art back, and we concluded with our conviction that this would be among the greatest art exhibitions ever to tour the United States. The patriarch seemed to be listening carefully; from time to time he would nod and smile. Oddly, his gentle, wrinkled face reminded me of my French Bulldog, and I felt we were bonding. I allowed myself the hope that His Beatitude would simply nod at the end of our speeches, agree to disagree with us, and, ultimately allow the show to go forward.
My optimism evaporated when, around 10:30 or so, after everyone but the patriarch had spoken, a young priest appeared from behind a curtain situated in the space between Christ and the patriarch. He carried the first of four small, wooden tables with refreshments. There were two guests per table, and the mission deputy and I were sharing the first table. On each table was a bunch of white grapes, a dish of walnuts, two generous pieces of cinnamon cake, two small cups of hot espresso, and two shots of Georgian cognac. I knew then that we were in for the long haul, which was not good, because it inevitably made the patriarch’s upcoming speech seem less like a response and more like a stand-alone declaration.
We ate and drank, mostly in silence. And then His Beatitude spoke. There was no hint of conciliation whatsoever; his warm and seemingly benevolent face was at odds with the harshness of his tone and the almost brutal sentiment behind it. Despite the fact that the Christian works in question are in an art museum, they are possessions of the Church, he said, and the Georgian State has no right to lend them to anyone. This meant that he alone would decide. Ilias II went on to say that the millennium is at hand and these works should not be out of the country at such an important time, since they will be the objects of Christian pilgrimage. (I did not believe this, but then he wasn’t looking for any response, and certainly not for my opinion.) Then a final point, that the patriarch alone by virtue of his ecclesiastical authority could maintain, that these sacred objects would be permanently defiled by contact with the secular world of foreign museums. They would lose their sacredness, I guess, which was a novel but certainly creative bit of theology-from-the-hip.
If I were really wise and sophisticated in these matters of “bullying” negotiations, I would have realized that it couldn’t end there. It could only end when we—Guroff and Vikan—somehow said it had ended; otherwise it would remain a standoff. Brilliantly, in order to force resolution, Patriarch Ilia II had something to offer us: a solution to our problem. His counteroffer had two points, neither of which I could have conjured up in my wildest imagination. The first was based on his claim, which bore no relationship whatsoever with reality, that there was plenty of Georgian art in American museums for us to borrow. This being the case, which of course it is not, he said we should go ahead and borrow from our sister institutions and leave Georgia alone. Again, the patriarch was not looking to be corrected on this matter by someone who had worked in American museums and on Orthodox medieval art in specific for more than twenty years. And apparently the patriarch hadn’t heard me when I described my encounter with Georgian medieval art in Vienna in 1981, when I said that I had never seen anything like it before.
After the craziness of point one, point two wasn’t going to make any difference, but we got it anyhow. The patriarch had a solution for how Georgian art in Georgia could be in the show after all. And it came in the briefcase of two bureaucrats in stiff gray suits. The pair entered the room around 11:00 p.m. and took positions under the Venetian chandelier just in front of me. The briefcase was opened, and from it emerged what looked to me, and I’m sure to everyone else, to be a sheet of clear Plexiglas. One of these two men in gray put the Plexiglass sheet right below my face and began to wiggle it back and forth under the chandelier’s light. Gradually, I could make out a very faint image of what looked to be a saint or maybe Christ. Patriarch Ilias II spoke (as twice translated), telling me that this is a hologram, and that we Georgians (as he said) are very good at making such holograms. And, the kicker: “Dr. Vikan, this hologram is 98 percent as good as the original.”
This claim was so patently absurd that we all should have fallen off those fancy high backed chairs of ours, bumped our heads on those ornate little tables now bereft of their midnight snacks, and fallen to the ground in uncontrollable laughter. But we didn’t, mostly because a patriarch can say lots of odd things, and we always nod in agreement and from time to time even bow our heads. I just looked at the clock with the sweep hand beside the door and wondered how much longer this was going to go on.
Eventually, as he continued, the
tactical aspect of his gambit sank in. He would say he had made an offer, genuine and in good faith. And after all, neither Guroff nor Vikan, nor the Deputy Chief of Mission, had disputed his two claims: that there was already plenty of Georgian art in America to borrow and that the crummy piece of Plexiglass was 98 percent as good as the real Georgian icon upon which it was based. President Shervardnadze’s Georgian National Exhibition was unacceptable for all those reasons the patriarch had enumerated, and which we did not dispute. What happened now? Were we going to take the patriarch up on his proposition? While he didn’t really ask us, and I never felt “asked,” that absurd counteroffer of his put the ball in our court. And by our de facto rejection, through our silence, we were the ones that had killed this project, not him. How clever! And then, finally, the meeting was over. And out we went, thanking His Beatitude as we left. This reminded me a bit of my farewell hug by Abune Paulos of Ethiopia at the Walters in 1993. Screwed by a patriarch yet again.
As we drove away, the Deputy Chief of Mission said something to me that was a revelation. The Georgians are agitated about the possible loan of their Christian art, he said, because over the centuries, as they have been conquered and occupied, and especially right now, as they are struggling to hold on to their two northern breakaway provinces of Abkhasia and Ossetia, they cling to the two things that make them Georgian: their faith and their language. And so those gilt silver icons in that decrepit museum downtown, with their Georgian inscriptions, are the very embodiment of what makes them Georgians. They are their equivalent of our Declaration of Independence. If that were true, I wondered to myself, would we loan the Declaration of Independence to Georgia?
AS WE LEFT TBILISI AFTER THAT CRAZY week we all knew our chances of success with this exhibition were low. But we had not given up. And we also knew that the question would be called before the September shipment date for most of the objects in the show. We’d have the answer in July if the few works planned to be sent well in advance of the opening for conservation treatment actually showed up on our doorstep. And the poster child for this was the Lailash Pentateuch, the canary strapped to the top of our metaphorical coal miner’s helmet.
In July we were busy building shipping crates, exhibition cases, and objects mounts for the one hundred fifty works of art in The Land of Myth and Fire; the show has been designed and we were writing the labels and wall texts. All of this was very expensive. Our signed agreement required that we build a traveling crate for the Lailash Pentateuch and send it off to Tbilisi in advance. The first bad sign (the canary is getting droopy) is that Georgian customs can’t seem to track down that crate in that little airport of theirs. And when they do find it, they won’t release it to the Institute of Manuscripts. And then we learn that the Georgian courier from the Institute—I imaged the teetering one—could not get a visa. So the canary’s head was now tilting ominously to the side. What rather surprised me about these developments was that the customs people and the visa people were in government, which meant they worked for President Shevardnadze.
My moment of clarity regarding the fate of The Land of Myth and Fire came on a Saturday morning in the middle of July. I was in downtown Baltimore and had just had my hair cut. Sitting pretty much motionless in the haircutter’s chair for twenty minutes gave me ample time to reflect on what Terry Weisser, the head of our conservation lab, had told me earlier in the day. She had just returned from Georgia and left me with two chilling anecdotes from her trip. The first involved a Georgian scientist from the metallurgical institute in Tbilisi. The two were in the gallery in the Georgian State Art Museum with the gilt silver icons discussing the ongoing sulfur corrosion and Terry said it would be best to get the works out and treated for the show. The Georgian scientist responded: “It’s God’s will that these objects stay here and die here.” God’s will? Die here? And then Terry went on to tell me what she had heard was happening “up north” in Georgia in the land of the Caucasus Mountains, black magic, and revenge killings. She said, “Up there in the north, a curse has been placed on you, Gary, and on your family.”
Well, I thought I was just caught between a nation’s president and its patriarch, but it seemed I was also caught between God and black magic. In that instant, I knew our show was dead.
THE LAND OF MYTH AND FIRE died officially on August 4, 1999, just ten weeks before its scheduled opening. By then the exhibition catalogue was already in production; it began with a celebratory letter from President Shevardnadze proclaiming that: “On behalf of the Georgian people, we are happy to share with you the treasures of Georgian culture and history.” At around the same time that the catalogue was coming off the presses (National Treasures of Georgia can be ordered from Amazon for $56), Ambassador Hartman received Shevardnadze’s letter of capitulation and explanation. It referenced “difficulties,” a “breaking point,” and “the will of the majority of Georgians.” The parliamentary and presidential elections loomed in the fall, Shevardnadze wrote, and this “irksome compromise” was “prompted solely by the best interests in sustaining Georgia’s unhindered democratic development.” (He would go on to win that election.) The letter also alluded to the “insurmountable obstacle” of the Georgian Orthodox Church that had taken a “clear-cut negative position on the treasures traveling outside the country.”
And so, to his regret, the president had been forced personally to abort the exhibition. The inexorable forces that did us in were captured in a single sentence added at the last minute at the front of the catalogue by Greg Guroff, the Cold War veteran: “Backward-looking political forces launched a demagogic and often vicious attack on the exhibit’s organizers—a thinly veiled campaign against President Shevardnadze and Georgia’s engagement with the West.” What a ride it had been, and now, what a crash.
All that was left to talk about was money. On September 23rd, almost exactly five months after the Georgian National Exhibition was publicly launched by Eduard Shevardnadze at the Mayflower, it was privately mourned and put to bed by Eduard Shevardnadze at the Washington Hilton in a conference room just inside the back entrance, the one just outside of which President Reagan was shot in 1981. The Georgian president was back in the US to meet again with Bill Clinton, and he took the opportunity to meet face-to-face with his old friend Arthur Hartman. Greg Guroff and I tagged along. Well after our 10:00 p.m. appointment, we were ushered into a tiny room by two hulking Georgian bodyguards with bulging suits (I assumed, concealing guns) and prominent earphones.
The event was an extended, halting apology from the Silver Fox, who at that moment looked exhausted and defeated. He repeated the sentiments and many of the phrases from his letter of early August. But the nub of the conversation was the money Hartman’s organization and the Walters had lost because of the cancellation and the promise Shevardnadze had made to compensate us. I was sitting directly across from him, and I felt embarrassed as an intruder on things private between those two old friends.
I’ve replayed my mental video of that final moment in the meeting over and over, and it gets no better. Shevardnadze said that when he returned to Tbilisi he would introduce a bill in parliament to secure funds to pay the Foundation for International Arts and Education and the Walters for their losses on the Georgian National Exhibition. It was a matter of State honor, of Presidential honor. And then, he concluded: “But please understand, my friend, we have not paid our army in six months.”
As I said, I didn’t belong there. But as this last, painful piece fell into place, I realized that I had been granted something that I could not have hoped for, even in success—participation in a national drama whose significance dwarfed our little exhibition.
Chapter Fifteen
A Mitzvah Acquisition
Sometimes God tells us to steal art. The Franks and Venetians of the Fourth Crusade, who in three days in April 1204 laid waste to Constantinople, the greatest city in Christendom, were ruthless in their looting and exalted in their enthusiasm for stealing from churches. On Sunday
morning, April 11, 1204, the day before the final assault, a small group of French Bishops sermonized to the twenty thousand or so Crusaders encamped on the Galata side of the Golden Horn. According to one among them, Robert de Clari, the Bishops said that this war was a “righteous one,” for the Greeks were “traitors and murderers” and were “worse than the Jews.” Within hours, the sacred altar of Hagia Sophia, “formed of all kinds of precious materials and admired by the whole world,” was broken into bits and distributed among the soldiers.
Eight months later in that same fateful year of 1204, the famous Sephardic Rabbi, philosopher, astronomer, and physician, Moses Maimonides, died at age 69 in Old Cairo where, for more than three decades, he had been the spiritual leader of its large Jewish community. This is Maimonides of the monumental Mishnah Torah, a code of Jewish law comprising 613 mitzvot or commandments, which remains the practical guide to almost all imaginable “dos” and “don’ts” in the daily life of devout Jews. It is, for example, a mitzvah (a commandment) to marry the widow of one’s brother who died childless.
When new circumstances arise in life requiring new legal guidance, it is to Maimonides that the Rabbinical Posek or “decisor” refers in rendering his opinion. Rabbi Yechiel Weinberg, who died in 1966, was such an eminent decisor, and in that role addressed the question of whether a Jew should ever steal from a synagogue. The answer is yes: it is a mitzvah, literally, a commandment, to take objects from a synagogue that has been “confiscated” by “hostile” local authorities. Among those who collect Judaica from Arab lands nowadays, the object of such divinely-directed stealing is called a “mitzvah acquisition.”