NEWS FEATURE: Thieves are looting Czech Republic’s historic churches

c. 1998 Religion News Service LITOMERICE, Czech Republic _ Two photographs of a church in northern Bohemia tell the familiar story. The first shows a resplendent, gold-leaf Baroque altar watched over by large statues of whirling saints. The second shows what happened after thieves finished ripping out anything they could carry. There was nothing left […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

LITOMERICE, Czech Republic _ Two photographs of a church in northern Bohemia tell the familiar story.

The first shows a resplendent, gold-leaf Baroque altar watched over by large statues of whirling saints. The second shows what happened after thieves finished ripping out anything they could carry. There was nothing left but crumbling plaster and holes in the wall as yet another church fell victim to a ruthless trade in stolen art.


Czech churches have been under siege, looted by criminals of untold thousands of artifacts since the end of communism in 1989. Statues, crucifixes, chalices, paintings, medieval manuscripts and even a heavy church bell have been looted. A stolen altar, recovered by police at a rural Czech cottage, was being used as a bar. “It is the most serious problem we are facing since the so-called Velvet Revolution,”said Josef Stulc, director of the State Office for Monument Care, who estimates the losses in the tens of millions of dollars.

The tide is turning, partly because of belated efforts to increase security, but mainly because the damage has been done. Outside a church near Prague, looted several times, a sign posted out of desperation reads:”There is nothing left to steal.” The 1989 democratic movement that ended communism also opened the nation’s borders to the West, where there are plenty of willing sellers and buyers.”During the whole Nazi and communist eras, the number of stolen items was smaller than the number in the last eight years,”said historian Jaroslav Macek, who is also spokesman for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Litomerice in the northwest Czech Republic.

Churches aren’t the only victims. Czech castles, museums and historic homes have also been looted. Some art thieves have concentrated on gravestones and outdoor statues in a land long renowned for religious Baroque artwork, police say.

There have been some successes in slowing the looting with improved security and cooperation among the church, police and art dealers.

In July, police recovered art objects from Germany valued at $11.2 million and stolen from various Czech sites. These included paintings, statues, an icon, and a Torah scroll that was taken from the Jewish Museum in the city of Brno. The haul included a painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder stolen from the Prague Castle during visiting hours.”We don’t quite know yet how they did it,”said one police source, who requested anonymity for fear of gangs dealing in art theft.

But the case is a rare bright spot in a dark story. Police still report about 500 cases of art theft each year. Stulc also said not all the art leaving these borders originated here. He said large-scale shipments of stolen icons from Russia and Ukraine also pass through.

Perhaps the hardest-hit Czech region is the Diocese of Litomerice. Many of its 1,500 parishes and churches are remote, under-used and difficult to guard.


In a three-week period earlier this year, for example, six churches were looted. In three cases police made arrests, but the other cases remained unsolved, Macek said.”Maybe only in the Thirty Years’ War were there such great losses”in these border regions, said Stulc, referring to the 17th century religious war that started in Prague and convulsed much of Europe.

The classic ingredients of crime _ opportunity and motive _ are all too ripe in this country.

A massive church-building program accompanied the Catholic Counter-Reformation in the 17th and 18th centuries. Immigrant Italian artisans turned this region into a Baroque treasure chest.

But many of the diocese’s Catholics were Sudeten Germans, expelled after World War II in retaliation for their role in Nazi Germany’s conquest of Czechoslovakia. After 41 years of communist hostility to religion, the region’s population is now only 21 percent Catholic, down from a pre-war 90 percent.

In spite of all of this, the churches had survived most of the turbulent century unscathed.”If you compare the initial situation in 1990 versus East Germany or Poland, our own historic interiors used to be miraculously intact,”said Stulc.

But vandals and then increasingly savvy art thieves began to see a market in artifacts from rural, unguarded churches.


At first, they just ravaged entire churches, taking anything they could carry.”It looked like a battle went over them,”said Stulc.”They were really sacked.” About two years ago, however, international mafias began getting more selective. They would study churches and then tell their underlings to steal specific valuables.

The Catholic Church, aided by state grants, is installing security systems in religious buildings and is hiding many valuables in safes.

The Litomerice diocese is also exhibiting its treasures here and abroad to inform conscientious art collectors that many religious items may be stolen, said Macek. Other dealers, however, remain all too happy to sell such items.

Border officials intercept about 30 shipments of smuggled antiquities each year, still a drop in the bucket.”Ideally, every car should be checked, but that is impossible considering the amount of traffic,”said Nina Psotova, spokeswoman for the General Director of Customs.

There are other frustrations. New laws require cultural experts to review any item that someone wants to take abroad for an exhibition, said Stulc, but his agency wants Parliament to close some loopholes.

Macek tells of convicted art thieves serving only short sentences and of the difficulty of finding ringleaders.


In one case, Macek recalled, teen-aged art thieves admitted they were working for mafia leaders from Prague. Police questioned these leaders but could not arrest them without corroborating evidence.”It was statement against statement. So what can you do?”he said. Many priests, moreover, may not know the value of the artwork in their churches and may not have time to care. Due to a priest shortage, most are busy tending several congregations single-handedly. At one church, a priest never bothered to learn how to use a newly installed $4,500 alarm system. “What I especially regret,”said Stulc,”are cases such as when a Gothic Madonna from the 14th century, which was built for that church and survived for centuries, is stolen.” Such works were”sometimes a bit naive, a bit vernacular,”he said, but they represent the region’s unique style, and they have little relevance in some foreign private collection.”It is barbarous and it is irreversible, what has been done,”he said.

(Ondrej Benda contributed to this report.)

DEA END SMITH

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