ABSTRACT

It was January 2008 and I was again facing the small ivory bull’s head from Afghanistan, included in the beautiful exhibition Hidden Afghanistan in the Nieuwe Kerk, in Amsterdam.1 The exhibition consisted of artifacts mainly deriving from a collection that was hidden for about 15 years in the vaults of the Central Bank in the Presidential Palace in Kabul. In 1989 the collection, much of which had been on exhibit in the National Museum of Kabul, was secretly packed and stored in the vaults of the Central Bank. It was feared that otherwise its survival could not be guaranteed. This fear became reality when, during a bloody civil war following the retreat of the Soviet Union in 1989, the museum was heavily damaged and looted. The bull’s head, which was not taken into protective custody, ended up, by the mid-1990s, at the Pakistani border town of Peshawar. It came to the Hidden Afghanistan exhibition via convoluted routes.