Belgium, put house up for sale and found rare marble slab stolen from Pompeii 50 years ago

A rare archaeological find from Pompeii, a small marble slab depicting the earthquake of 62 A.D., an event described by Seneca that caused several damages in the Vesuvian cities (Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabia), has been found in an ... unthinkable place: the house of a family in Tongeren, a town of 30,000 inhabitants in Flanders (Belgium), not far from the border with the Netherlands and the city of Maastricht.

The find resurfaced after the family that owned the house put the property up for sale. The owner’s son, Geert Detemmerman, told the local website VRT News that, according to his recollection, the piece of marble was sold to his father during a vacation in Italy in the 1970s: Geert was still a child but remembers that a man approached his father with the piece of marble and, for a sum described as “considerable,” offered to buy it as a souvenir. His father agreed and took the object with him to Belgium, not suspecting the illicit origin of the piece, which was then walled up in one of the walls of the house. And there it remained for about 50 years, without anyone paying any more attention to it. Then, the need to move Mr. Detemmerman, now 85, to another home led his son to check whether the marble work had any value.

He therefore contacted the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongeren, one of the country’s most important archaeological museums, and the institution sent two members to take a look at what he had in the house. The experts realized that the object is almost 2,000 years old and comes from Pompeii, from where it was illegally exported, so much so that archaeologists in Italy were looking for it. “We have a little bit of information about how the object was stolen at the time,” said Bart Demarsin, an expert at the Gallo-Roman Museum. “It closely matches the original piece that we recognize from the photos.” The slab, as mentioned, depicts a scene from the 62 A.D. Pompeii earthquake, and corresponds, Demarsin noted, “to a similar piece, also depicting buildings that collapsed during that earthquake.” The pieces originally came from the home of a wealthy Roman banker in central Pompeii. Both pieces were removed from the residence and remained on display at the site for a long time. Today the first piece is still on display in the Antiquarium of Pompeii, the other was stolen in the 1970s and is the one found in Belgium.

After the find, Belgian police came to Detemmerman’s house for due investigation, and later the director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park was also informed. A delegation from the park is expected to travel to Belgium to confirm that it is the original marble slab. After that, the find should return to Pompeii. The Detemmerman family is now hoping for financial compensation for preserving the work, he told VRT News again. “The police,” Geert Detemmerman said, “told us that maybe we can get compensation, because after all, the work has been hanging here for 50 years without anything happening to it.”

The work actually is listed in the database of illicitly misappropriated property of the Carabinieri’s Nucleo Tutela Patrimonio Culturale (Cultural Heritage Protection Unit): the image matches that of the property that was in Detemmerman’s house. It is therefore hoped for a quick return to Italy.

Belgium, put house up for sale and found rare marble slab stolen from Pompeii 50 years ago

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