Mysteries of the Snake Goddess

Five things you didn't know about forgeries:

1- Michelangelo (reputedly) got his start in art by forging Greek and Roman works of art, even burying them to appear "authentic." Enough anecdotal and circumstantial evidence exists to suggest this almost certainly happened to some degree, but some scholars believe he was responsible for some well-known "Greek" treasures such as the Laocoon.

2- The world's most famous forger was only caught after he was charged with...treason? After the Second World War, Han van Meegeren faced the death penalty for selling a Dutch national treasure, a Vermeer painting, to Hermann Göring. Van Meegeren's defence? Goring got a fake. Van Meegeren proved he had painted it himself, and conned Göring . All's well that ends well? He was acquitted for treason, but went to jail anyway. He'd been making and selling fake Vermeers for quite some time. And not just to Nazis.

3-In 2000, Famed Japanese archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura sparked a national crisis when he was filmed digging holes and burying artifacts, only to discover them, often the next day. Fujimura had been considered the leading expert on Japan's paleolithic age, mostly because of his uncanny luck discovering artifacts. This necessitated a complete rethink of Japanese's prehistoric past. How complete? Well...Japan may not actually have been settled during the paleolithic age. 

4- Unsurprisingly, religion has inspired generations of forgers - sometimes to make money, sometimes to provide "proof." The Kinderhook Plates belong in the latter category. "Found" in a Native mound in Illinois, they were bell-shaped brass plates with Egyptian inscriptions, which the Mormon church seized on as evidence that a lost (white) tribe of Israel really did end up in America. (They've since conceded they were fakes. Probably. Though maybe not.)

5- According to various sources, 19th-century French landscape artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot is the most-forged artist of all time. Why? Very simple: he was popular, and his work wasn't too difficult to duplicate. You were expecting some shadowy Da Vinci Code-esque conspiracy?  It's not always a convoluted answer, kids. 


"The existence of forgeries can hardly be regarded as an unmixed evil.  The knowledge of their existence tends...to encourage a more minute and scholarly investigation of every detail in genuine objects of antiquity."
- Sir John Evans, 1893

The lady herself. Not pictured: authenticity

Any freshman art history student can tell you all about the Boston Goddess. 

Long the centrepiece of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts' Minoan collection, the goddess was the apex of a huge wave of interest in pre-classical archaeology in the early 1900s. 

The sudden interest was partly an offspring of Heinrich Schliemann's incredible finds at Troy and Mycenae, and partly because white Europeans and North Americans were keen to discover ancient white civilizations to rival their better-known cousins in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

That sounds pretty racist by today's standards, and undoubtedly there was an element of an inferiority complex and chauvinism at play. But the Iliad and Odyssey had literally been popular for 2,500 years - and that's conservative. Discovering the actual city, which most believed was mythical, naturally attracted a lot of interest in civilizations and artifacts from the era.

Another myth from (approximately) the same era involved the Minotaur, which lived in a labyrinth on Crete, and had to be fed virgins. Excavations at Knossos revealed a huge palace complex, with a floor plan that looked...well...labyrinthine.

Public interest inevitably leads to ways of making money. And ways of making money lead to grasping and abuse. And forgeries - ever noticed how many relics from the Titanic for sale online? If they were all genuine, the poor boat would've sunk in the harbour. 

I assure you, this goddess is 1,000% genuine

Which brings us to Boston.

Desperate to get in on the Minoan craze, museums played loose with rules of provenance and provenience - where stuff came from, and who owned it.

The problem was most of the stuff dug up at Knossos was in horrible shape.  (A lack of obvious artifacts being a primary reason it lay hidden so long.) What recognizable items and images did emerge became huge draws.

Boston's Snake Goddess, allegedly from Knossos, was the biggest draw of them all. Mostly restored, it was a striking and hauntingly beautiful figure, much rhapsodized over by writers, scholars, poets, and more. 

Possibly also a fake.

From the beginning, the museum was vague about how, exactly, it came into their possession.  It was a gift.  It was imported secretly by a refugee. It was fake. 

Not the last one.  Definitely not the last one. 

The problem was, real artifacts did start to emerge, including other "snake goddesses." Boston's goddess didn't really look like any of them. Neither did the handful of other, inevitable forgeries.  (Even more ridiculous, the factory where this and other forgeries were made, right down to the individual artisan, were identified. The story was ignored.) 

In the end - well, there really isn't one here. Author Kenneth Lapatin makes a pretty conclusive and damning case the Boston Goddess is a fake, but it's hard to prove a negative. Even the otherwise-conclusive carbon 14 test (which makes the statue "several hundred years old") is prone to serious error, as the statue was restored using modern materials. 

So what happened? The Minoan craze died out. Nobody cared whether the Snake Goddess was real or not.  But she definitely did inspire a whole generation of archaeologists, and almost certainly funded two of them. 

So yeah - forgeries aren't all bad after all.*

*Do not forge art.  Forging art is bad.

Endgame, 1945

Five things you didn't know about the last days of the Second World War:

1-The Allies (especially the Americans) were absolutely, totally convinced that Hitler planned a desperate last stand in the Alps, surrounded by the SS and elite "Werewolf" commando units. This would have resulted in Stalingrad-level casualties. Instead, "Onkel Adolf" stayed in der bunker and killed himself.

2- The Third World War nearly broke out before the Second was totally finished.  In Trieste, part of Italy but claimed by (soon-to-be Communist) Yugoslavia, allied soldiers stared down their Yugoslav counterparts - and a few shots were (probably) fired in anger. Stalin decided this wasn't the hill to die on.

3-As many realize, the Third Reich had two Fuhrers - Hitler, and Admiral Karl Doenitz, who took over after Hitler's suicide. What many don't realize is the Allies kinda sorta cooperated with Doenitz's government for a short time. Even after the fall of Berlin, the Germans were still entrenched and very much in control of northern German ports, Denmark and Norway. Stretched to the limit in manpower and resources, the allies left Doenitz in administrative control in Flensburg, a town near the Danish border. This lasted about a week. Wasn't popular, put it that way. 

4-It sounds like biased history, but by every account, shred of evidence and anecdotal record, occupying Allied troops were saints compared to their Soviet allies. While looting and occasional rough treatment were far from unknown, there were startlingly few accounts of rape. Unfortunately, murder and gang rape was systemic in lands liberated by the Red Army. Certainly German troops believed so, running day and night to have the opportunity to surrender to Canadian, British, or American soldiers.

5-It sounds like an urban legend, but recently unsealed evidence indicates the war ended just in time: Hitler's scientists were perilously close to developing truly advanced missiles and rockets, and possibly even atomic weapons.



It's always darkest before the dawn.

No match for bombers, tanks, and drunken Russians

Or so they say.

In April and May 1945, the 20th Century's long, dark night was coming to an end. Mussolini was dead, and Italy almost pacified. Hitler's Luftwaffe no longer existed in any meaningful or effective way, and his armies comprised of old men and terrified teenagers firing handguns at tanks. 

But still Hitler's opera - his crazed ode to gotterdammerung, the Twilight of the Gods - wasn't quite played out.  In the keen retrospect of history, it's all too easy to look back at the end of the Second World War as the obvious and natural conclusion.

You know the story: with the Russians and Allies closing in from three directions, Hitler eventually offs himself, the good guys win, and then Harry Truman hands over Eastern Europe to Stalin on a silver platter. 

But at the time, it didn't seem like a foregone conclusion. David Stafford's gripping history tells the story of the war's final few weeks through the eyes of those who lived through it: a Canadian paratrooper, English and Kiwi war correspondents, English soldiers, and poignantly, a German mother of two separated from her two young children, and her desperate cross-continental search for them.

The End. But that wasn't a foregone conclusion.

But Stafford's history is more than just a series of revealing and often terrifying anecdotes.  He also describes the very real and plausible Allied fear that Hitler would abandon Berlin to fight on in the Alps, or perhaps Denmark and Norway.  He still had legions of fanatically loyal SS troops, and at least 300,000 troops in Norway. While we know now that by 1945, Hitler was a stammering, drug-addled wreck - but that didn't have to be the case. 

Stafford also describes - in heart-rendering detail - the sheer impossibility of the task facing Allied occupational armies. The entire continent was months away from starvation, they had millions of civilians and prisoners (of war and concentration camps) to feed (and often, restrain), and central Europe was plagued by roving gangs of recently-freed slave labourers who (a) had zero intention of returning to the Soviet Union, yet (b) didn't have many qualms about killing and raping their way from town to town.

Not a few - Winston Churchill chief among them - also believed there was a fourth (after Italy, Germany and Japan) menace to deal with - Russia. 

Nobody beloved by girls can be evil, right?

 The allies were well aware of their Soviet friends' penchant for installing local communists in power, removing absolutely everything of value back to Russia (literally including kitchen sinks), and - worst of all - raping and killing their way across the continent. 

Mother Russia was angry, and that was to be expected. But while the Allies were horrified by what they found in Nazi prison and death camps, it's not a stretch to say they were actually more frightened by reports trickling in from Soviet-occupied areas. 

How frightened? The Brits commissioned a quick report codenamed Operation Unthinkable - you can't make this stuff up - which basically asked what would happen if everyone stopped pretending to be friends and continued the war.

It was deemed hopeless (at best) for the allies, who would most likely lose, condemning most of Europe to a long, Stalinist stupor. 

Cold comfort for Poles and Hungarians, I know. But Allied restraint probably saved Austria, Italy and possibly even France from communism.

Oh yeah - the German who lost her kids. Despite all odds, she did find them. There were still some happy endings to be found.