As a result of Hungarian-American cooperation, the previously stolen bell of the Jásztelek chapel in Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county has returned to Hungary after twenty-one years from the United States, Péter Szijjártó announced in a Facebook post .
After that, the bell, which was stolen from the chapel tower more than two decades ago, can be returned to Jásztelek within days, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade informed. As he wrote:
In September 2001, the parish's old bell, cast in 1937, was stolen from the tower of the Chapel of Our Lady of Havas in Jásztelek.
The investigation at the time did not lead to results, and more than twenty years passed when a member of the local Hungarian community in the US state of Louisiana noticed a bell decorated with familiar inscriptions in an antique shop.
Hungarian diplomacy also got involved in the story from here on, and the investigative team was established in cooperation with the FBI, which first identified and then seized the bell of the Havas Boldogasszony chapel, which was believed to be lost, wrote the head of Hungarian diplomacy.
The background of the case is that in February 2022, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Affairs (KKM) received a notification about "a bell with an inscription from Jásztelek", and then through the antiquities protection sub-unit of the Hungarian police, that the bell of unknown origin turned up in the American art trade.
The art supervision authority managed to prove the theft and the unauthorized export from the country, and collected documents and declarations related to the right of ownership, and then made them available to the American investigative agencies. In cooperation with the antiquities protection unit of the Hungarian police, the stolen bell was eventually seized by the FBI, the post reads.
(MTI)
Featured image: Facebook/Péter Szijjártó
