The fate of the antioch mosaic pavements: Some reflections

Abstract

The paper offers a short memory of the spectacular investigations carried out from 1930 to 1939 in the area of the ancient Antioch, and also remembers the fate of the more than a hundred mosaic pavements uncovered and unearthed in that site. The most part of the mosaics had to be cut and removed in sections, so when the campaigns ended with the annexation of the northern Syria to Turkey and with the outbreak of World War II in 1939, they were objects of a sharing among the sponsors of that archaeological project. A disputable division that dismembered an extraordinary cultural heritage of Antioch.