Sacred and Stolen by Gary Vikan

Author:Gary Vikan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590794012
Publisher: SelectBooks, Inc.
Published: 2016-09-29T04:00:00+00:00

ON WEDNESDAY, DAY TWO, there was this totally wound-up Acting Director of the Cypriot Department of Antiquities named Anastasios Papageorghiou—the one who on Monday evening when I got off the elevator was so clearly disappointed. He had the finger-pointing, lecturing manner of a school teacher. Papageorghiou was followed by the much more affable and engaging Marios Evriviades, Press Officer at the Embassy of Cyprus. Their shared message was simple. Yes, we told the world that this church had been violated. The trouble was, as Joe Emerson drove home in cross examination, Marios’ scores of press releases were picked up almost exclusively by Greek newspapers, and so their message really didn’t reach the broader art-buying market. We all recognized this as the high water mark of the trial for Peg and her defense team.

The next day, Thursday, things were put right for Cyprus by their star of stars witness, Father Pavlos Maheriotis, Abbot of the Holy Monastery of Machaeras, with his long beard, black robes, stovepipe hat, and golden-topped staff. Father left by the east side entrance of the courthouse every day after the proceedings, and there were cameras there to capture that moment of solemn drama. Because Peg’s legal team must have assumed this quiet and dignified man, who seemed literally to radiate his profound faith, was somewhere up there in the Orthodox stratosphere, they didn’t prepare well. His message on behalf of Cyprus and Panagia Kanakaria was simple and clear. The mosaics belong to the church and have for 1,400 years. The ancient church has never been abandoned, and only the high administration of this church can authorize the movement of parts of the church out of the building. And it has never done that and never would.

Then the defense lawyer, Ezra Friedlander, who had that sleaze quality that some lawyers have, with clothes too fancy and a tone too glib and condescending, got up to make Father Pavlos look parochial and naive. This was a big mistake. I can still hear Father’s deep sonorous voice and English accent when he told Mr. Sleaze, Esq. that he had a PhD in theology from Oxford University. Somehow, just then, I knew we had won, and I think everyone else knew it too. Tom Kline and his crew took as proof of this the rumor that Judge Noland had asked to go see the mosaics in the bank vault.

The defense side was sometimes just straight-out comical. There was young and diminutive George Feldman, Peg’s business partner, who described in some detail how he would scrub Peg’s back in the bathtub after she had hurt her wrist and could not scrub herself. And there were the very entertaining personality of Bob Fitzgerald, a.k.a. Bob Jones. Two things made us laugh. The first was when one of our lawyers asked Fitzgerald to read back a portion of his deposition, and he said he couldn’t find his glasses. Since this exchange went on for a while, Judge Noland called for a glasses-finding recess. In

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.