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NEW YORK — Col. Matthew Bogdanos, the Greek-American prosecutor who leads the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, has been named the recipient of the 2026 Marica Vilcek Prize in Art History, a major honor recognizing careers that shape the study, protection, and return of cultural heritage. The prize carries a $100,000 cash award, but Bogdanos declined the money, asking the Vilcek Foundation to donate the funds to nonprofit organizations of his choosing.
> Previously: “Rare Manuscripts Returned in Historic Ceremony at St. Nicholas”
Created in 2024, the Marica Vilcek Prize in Art History honors art historians, curators, and fine arts professionals whose work has a broad impact on institutions, scholarship, and the public understanding of culture. Candidates are proposed by field advisors and reviewed by the Vilcek Foundation’s board. The Vilcek Foundation was established in 2000 by Jan and Marica Vilcek—whose emigration from Czechoslovakia to New York helped inspire its mission to highlight immigrant contributions while supporting the arts and sciences.
When Bogdanos was 12, his mother—then a waitress in the family’s Greek restaurant in Lower Manhattan—gave him a copy of Homer’s Iliad, sparking a lifelong devotion to antiquity. He spent his childhood around the family business, absorbing his Greek heritage early and turning to Homer as a moral vocabulary of duty and honor.
Bogdanos has served as an assistant district attorney in New York City since 1988, prosecuting more than 200 violent felony trials, including more than 100 homicides, while also serving in the Marine Corps through six combat tours in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Horn of Africa.
He became globally known in April 2003, when he led a multi-agency recovery team into the Iraq Museum in Baghdad after widespread looting during the invasion. That investigation helped recover more than 9,000 pieces from eight countries and exposed links between antiquities trafficking and terrorist financing; the work earned him the National Humanities Medal and later informed policy debates about the illicit trade’s role in funding violence.
Since returning to the DA’s office in 2010, he has led the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, a rare law enforcement team that operates at the top of the art market, where museums, auction houses, and wealthy collectors sometimes intersect with criminal networks. The unit has recovered more than 6,100 antiquities valued at more than $480 million, stolen from countries including Greece. On October 3, 2025, 29 antiquities were repatriated to the Hellenic Republic; the artifacts ranged from the Final Neolithic to the Late Hellenistic period.
Bogdanos’ connection to the Greek Orthodox community was also on public display at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine at Ground Zero, where he spoke during the April 28, 2023 repatriation event involving manuscripts connected to the Monastery of the Theotokos Eikosiphoinissa in Drama, northern Greece, which suffered large-scale pillage during World War I.
In his remarks that day, His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros praised Col. Bogdanos “for his incomparable service to the recovery of cultural and historical treasures.” Bogdanos underscored what is at stake when heritage is stolen:
“History warns us worse is coming. Once you erase a people’s historical identity, the next step is to erase the people themselves.”
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