Two masks of the Indigenous neighborhood of the Kogi from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia are displayed on the presidential palace in Berlin on June 16, 2023.

Markus Schreiber/AP

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Two masks of the Indigenous neighborhood of the Kogi from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia are displayed on the presidential palace in Berlin on June 16, 2023.

Markus Schreiber/AP

BERLIN — Germany handed over to Colombia on Friday two masks made by the Indigenous Kogi folks that had been in a Berlin museum’s assortment for greater than a century, one other step within the nation’s restitution of cultural artifacts as European nations reappraise their colonial-era previous.

The wood “sun masks,” which date again to the mid-Fifteenth century, have been handed over on the presidential palace throughout a go to to Berlin by Colombian President Gustavo Petro. The resolution to restitute them follows a number of years of contacts between Berlin’s museum authority and Colombia, and an official Colombian request final yr for his or her return.

“We know that the masks are sacred to the Kogi,” who stay within the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains of northern Colombia, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier stated on the ceremony. “May these masks have a good journey back to where they are needed, and where they are still a bridge between people and nature today.”

Petro welcomed the return of “these magic masks,” and stated he hopes that “more and more pieces can be recovered.” He stated at a later information convention with Germany’s chancellor that the Kogi neighborhood will in the end determine what occurs with the masks. He added: “I would like a museum in Santa Marta, but that’s my idea and we have to wait for their idea.”

Konrad Theodor Preuss, who was the curator of the forerunner of right this moment’s Ethnological Museum in Berlin, acquired the masks in 1915, throughout a prolonged analysis journey to Colombia on which he accrued greater than 700 objects. According to the German capital’s museums authority, he wasn’t conscious of their age or of the actual fact they weren’t presupposed to be bought.

“This restitution is part of a rethink of how we deal with our colonial past, a process that has begun in many European countries,” Steinmeier stated. “And I welcome the fact that Germany is playing a leading role in this.”

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, proper, and Colombian President Gustavo Petro shake palms after a ceremony to return two masks of the indigenous neighborhood of the Kogi from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia at Bellevue Palace in Berlin on Friday.

Markus Schreiber/AP

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German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, proper, and Colombian President Gustavo Petro shake palms after a ceremony to return two masks of the indigenous neighborhood of the Kogi from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia at Bellevue Palace in Berlin on Friday.

Markus Schreiber/AP

Governments and museums in Europe and North America have more and more sought to resolve possession disputes over objects that have been looted throughout colonial instances.

Last yr, Germany and Nigeria signed an settlement paving the best way for the return of a whole lot of artifacts often called the Benin Bronzes that have been taken from Africa by a British colonial expedition greater than 120 years in the past. Nigerian officers hope that accord will immediate different nations that maintain the artifacts, which ended up unfold far and broad, to comply with go well with.

Hermann Parzinger, the pinnacle of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees the Ethnological Museum and others in Berlin, famous that the background is especially complicated within the case of the Kogi masks.

They weren’t “stolen in a violent context” and Colombia was already lengthy since an unbiased nation, he stated. Preuss purchased them from the inheritor of a Kogi priest, who “apparently wasn’t entitled to sell these masks” — that means that their acquisition “wasn’t quite correct.”

“But there is another aspect in this discussion of colonial contexts, and that is the rights of Indigenous people,” Parzinger added, pointing to a 2007 U.N. decision stating that artifacts of non secular and cultural significance to Indigenous teams ought to be returned.