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Winston Churchill portrait “The Roaring Lion” was stolen from a hotel in Canada. Police tracked the photograph to a buyer in Italy.
A portrait of Sir Winston Churchill hung on the walls of the famed Fairmont Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, Canada, for years — but in 2022 it was discovered the iconic photo had been replaced with a copy.
More than two years later, Ottawa Police have found the photograph in Italy and said the buyer is planning to hand it back over to Canada during a ceremony in Rome.
A hotel worker discovered something was amiss with the portrait, named “The Roaring Lion,” in August 2022. He noticed the frame of the print did not match the others, the Smithsonian reported, so the hotel called photographer Yousuf Karsh‘s manager. The manager said he took one look at the signature on the replacement photo and knew it was a copy.
“We are deeply saddened by this brazen act,” Geneviève Dumas, the Chateau Laurier’s general manager, said in a news release at the time. “The hotel is incredibly proud to house this stunning Karsh collection, which was securely installed in 1998.”
Karsh, one of the world’s most celebrated portrait photographers, took Winston’s photo in 1941 after he took the prime minister’s cigar while he was smoking. Churchill’s resulting scowl made the photo so famous that it eventually made it to the front of England’s five-pound note.
Both Karsh and Winston had stayed at the hotel. Ottawa’s CTV television reported Karsh and his wife lived in the hotel for two decades and even operated his studio in the hotel from 1972 to 1992.
A subsequent police investigation found the portrait had been taken between December 25, 2021, and January 6, 2022. Police found the portrait was sold through an auction house in London to a buyer in Italy. Both were unaware the portrait was stolen.
Ottawa police said they used “public tips, forensic analysis, and international cooperation,” to track down the thief. A man from Ottawa — whose name the police won’t release due to a publication ban — was arrested on April 25, 2024.
The 43-year-old was charged with theft and trafficking, police said. The portrait’s buyer, who is from Genoa, has been working with Italian police to hand over the photo and “arrangements have been made with the citizen to ceremoniously hand over the portrait to the Ottawa Police Service in Rome later this month,” police said.
“Once in Ottawa Police custody, the portrait will be ready for the last step of its journey home to the Fairmont Château Laurier, where it will once again be displayed as a notable historic portrait,” police said.
Workers removing tree branches near a historic cathedral in Chelm, Poland, unearthed something unexpected when they came upon two children’s skeletons in a shallow burial pit where no gravesites are marked, the government’s Culture Ministry said.
Neither skeleton was buried in a coffin and one of the children was buried with the characteristics of an anti-vampire burial, Dr. Stanisława Gołuba, the archaeologist leading the research, said in a Facebook post. The child’s head was separated from its body, the post said, and the skull was facing down into the ground arranged on a stone. This, plus the way the skeletons were oriented, appears to be consistent with ancient burial methods used to prevent a person thought to be a demonic entity from exiting the grave, Gołuba said.
The skeletons appeared to be from the Early Middle Ages.
The children’s skeletons were removed from their graves, documented and waiting for further analysis, the statement said.
It’s the most recent in a series of findings in Poland of remains buried in ways that suggest people at the time believed they were dealing with vampires or other supernatural entities.
In 2022, Polish researchers found the remains of a woman at a gravesite in the village of Pień with a sickle around her neck and a triangular padlock on her foot. According to ancient beliefs, the padlock was supposed to prevent a deceased person thought to be a vampire from returning from the dead. The sickle was thought to cut the neck if the corpse tried to rise from the grave.
Professor Dariusz Polinski of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun said this type of practice became common throughout Poland in the 17th century in response to a reported vampire epidemic. In addition to practices with a sickle, sometimes corpses were burned, smashed with stones or had their heads and legs cut off.
Six so-called “vampire skeletons” were also found at a cemetery in northwest Poland in 2013. Each was buried with either a sickle laid across their necks or stones placed beneath their jaws said Lesley Gregoricka of the University of South Alabama who led the research team.
contributed to this report.
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