| Abstract [eng] |
After 1990, Lithuania and Russia, like a number of other countries of the world, have accepted international agreements and guidelines recommended by the ICOM (International Council of Museums) Code of Professional Ethics which states the belonging of the collections to the locations where they were formed. However, overdue of the rest of Vilnius Museum of Antiquities collections for Lithuania warns that there must be legal intergovernmental agreements between Russia and Lithuania on the return of cultural property to Lithuania. There is a lack of an appropriate juridical position. The agreement between Russia and the Republic of Lithuania (29 07 1991) does not specify the return of cultural property from Russia to Lithuania. The mutual Cooperation Agreement between the Ministries of Culture (06 07 2009) just appealed to the discovery of the cultural property illegally exported to the territory of another state. According to the Lithuanian government decrees, programs, heritage laws, resolutions that refer to the issues of return of the cultural property to Lithuania, concrete recoveries from Russia have yet not been achieved. The National Museum of Lithuania is interested to recover the collections of the Vilnius Museum of Antiquities from the Russian Federation. The Museum, which keeps about 1000 items from those collections, is the successor of the Vilnius Museum of Antiquities. These items are only the remains of the collection of the Vilnius Museum of Antiquities, which were left in Vilnius by the Tsarist Russian authorities, and include also 285 items returned from Soviet Russia. |
