Thieves have blasted open a museum in the Dutch city of Assen and escaped with a collection of millennia-old Romanian gold and silver artifacts. The burglary is the latest in a series of art heists to hit the Netherlands.
Police received reports of an explosion at the Drenths Museum in the early hours of Saturday morning. Officers arrived on the scene and discovered that “several archaeological masterpieces” had been taken. In a statement on Monday, police said that they believe multiple suspects were involved, and that Interpol is taking part in the investigation.
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The thieves made off with the golden helmet of Cotofenesti, a 2,400-year-old work of art considered a national treasure in Romania, and three golden bracelets dating from around 50BC.
The items were part of the ‘Dacia: Rich in gold and silver’ exhibition, which was in its closing weekend. The helmet, bracelets, and hundreds of other gold and silver objects were on loan to the Drenths Museum from more than a dozen museums in Romania.
The Dacians were an ancient Indo-European people who inhabited a large swathe of modern-day Romania from the Bronze Age until their conquest by the Romans in the second century AD. Sitting on an important trade crossroads, their art was influenced by the Greeks, Celts, Thracians, Scythians and Persians.
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“This is a black day for the Drents Museum in Assen and the National History Museum of Romania in Bucharest,” the Drents Museum’s director, Harry Tupan, said in a statement. “In [the museum’s] 170-year existence, such a major incident has never occurred. It also causes us great sadness towards our colleagues in Romania.”
In a Facebook post on Sunday, Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu said that he was organizing a “crisis team at the government level” to work toward finding the stolen treasures. Ciolacu said that Romanian law enforcement officers would work with Dutch police to track down the stolen pieces, while Romanian experts would be dispatched to the Netherlands to “ensure the rapid return” of the rest of the collection.
The robbery came two months after thieves blasted their way into a gallery in the town of Oisterwijk and stole four Andy Warhol prints. Similar thefts took place at an art fair in Maastricht in 2022 and at a museum in Laren in 2020, where Vincent van Gogh’s ‘The Parsonage Garden’ was stolen. The Van Gogh painting was recovered three years later and is currently on display in Groningen.