Thus The New York Times today next to a picture of a stone statue that smacks of ancient Greece. “An aggressive campaign by Turkey to reclaim antiquities it says were looted has spurred a debate about who owns such works after centuries of shifting borders,” the newspaper elaborates. An interesting question, indeed. Much of Byzantium was in Turkish hands way before they took Constantinople in 1453. Only few antiquities of note were looted from Byzantium itself, the best known example being the horses above the entrance of the church of Saint Mark in Venice, which were collected after the capture of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade. Byzantium is no more, and Greece has little or nothing to do with it, anyhow. Perhaps it is Rome in Italy that could claim the antiquities, instead? If anything else, the Turkish campaign will open a couple of chapters of European history, most of which have been forgotten already. The first lesson will be that borders are nothing if not forever shifting, as any historical atlas will testify in a jiffy. And there have been about ten-thousand border changes in Europe broadly defined only in the last one-thousand years.