Word: sarrafian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...name of Mr. Hecht's source because "the name was difficult to spell." Here I must protest and explain. The New York Times called me at my home in the country on Sunday, Feb. 18, as I was making a snowman with my children. The name (Dikran A. Sarrafian) was in my files in the office, and since there are variant spellings of the name, I wanted to be sure that I gave the right one. This I did as soon as I was back in my office...
...disingenuousness or extraordinary lack of judgment that the name was difficult to spell and he couldn't remember it. Eventually, under pressure, Bothmer produced that hard-to-spell name and some letters by the bowl's former owner, an Armenian coin collector in Beirut named Dikran A. Sarrafian...
...Sarrafian, the letters said, had inherited the bowl, then in fragments, from his father, who acquired it "by exchange with an amateur against a collection of Greek and Roman coins in 1920 in London." Offered earlier and more willingly, that evidence might have settled things. But by now charges and countercharges were shooting back and forth across the Atlantic. Reporters were pursuing Hecht, Sarrafian, Met Director Thomas Moving and a restorer in Zurich named Fritz Buerki, who had expertly repaired the calyx krater for Hecht...
Reporters who reached Sarrafian, 68, found him a little vague. "My interest is in coins," he said in Beirut. "I care little for vases." He had really paid little attention to the calyx krater. The pieces had been in a hatbox from 1926, when his father died, until 1970, when he consigned the box to Hecht. There were some odd discrepancies in his story. The Met had said that Hecht only got an agent's 10% of the price. Sarrafian suggested otherwise. The Met said the vase had no missing parts. Sarrafian said there were pieces missing, some...