Foundry
67 graves damaged in Bettembourg. Bronze crosses and figures taken. The first assumption was scrap metal. The real answer is stranger.
A wave of targeted thefts has hit Luxembourg cemeteries in recent weeks. The most striking case was a week ago at Bettembourg, where 67 graves were damaged. The primary items stolen were bronze crosses and figures. The obvious motive: sell the metal for scrap.
Mike Decker, an antique dealer with 40 years of experience, says that is the wrong theory. A typical bronze figure, such as a 100-year-old bronze Jesus, weighs about half a kilogram. At copper prices, that is around 9 euros per kilo. The scrap value is negligible.
Selling the items as antiques is not viable either. Decker says that in 40 years, he has never seen anyone try to sell cemetery bronze. It is immediately obvious to professionals that these objects are stolen, and no legitimate dealer would touch them.
The real value, Decker believes, is in the bronze itself as raw material. He suspects the stolen bronze is smuggled to eastern Europe through organised crime networks, where specialised workshops use it to manufacture convincing forgeries of sought-after artworks.
The logic: you cannot walk into a legitimate foundry and ask them to cast a copy of a known sculpture from a pile of melted bronze. That is fraud. No legitimate foundry would do it. So there must be a black-market foundry somewhere producing these copies.
The profits are enormous. Forged copies of artworks sell for up to 150'000 euros or more. The composition of bronze has remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years, making forgeries difficult to detect. The only tell: forgeries are typically about 3% smaller than the original pieces, a difference that often only emerges during expert appraisal.
So 67 graves in Bettembourg were not vandalised for 9 euros a kilo. They were mined for old bronze, the raw material of a forgery pipeline that turns cemetery metal into six-figure fakes.