"As a writer Gary Vikan has three virtues hardly ever found together. He genuinely loves art and is extraordinarily erudite on the subject; he cares about what’s right and wrong; and he is wonderfully alive to the human capacity for absurd behavior. Gary’s scholarship and professional ethics, combined with his impish sense of humor, make for delightful reading." 

— Dan Hofstadter, author of Goldberg’s Angel: An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade

Postcards from Behind the Iron Curtain

This memoir follows our adventures in Nicolae Ceausescu's communist Romania, where I was an IREX Fellow during the 1974-1975 academic year, studying the survival of Byzantine culture there after the fall of Constantinople. 

Elana brought her diary; I brought my Nikon camera and 30 rolls of film. She was 28; I was 27. We were both Princeton graduate students. 

Our preconceived notion, born of wishful thinking, was that Bucharest would be a worthy Eastern European version of Paris and that rural Romania would be an idyllic, pre-industrial version of the French countryside. Whether those notions were true or not (they were not), we were bent on making that our everyday reality. Sure, our apartment was bugged, and our daily activities reported to the Securitate by informers, who were likely among our best friends. But we chose to remain naïve.

Join us, innocents behind the Iron Curtain, as we dodge Romani horse-drawn carts on Transylvanian byways, stand in endless lines to buy stale bread and chunks of sinewy beef, struggle to prepare gourmet meals on a hot plate in our bathroom, and, up north, sleep in a monastic cell, dine with the mother superior, and crash an Orthodox wedding. 

Nicolae Ceausescu's regime, the most repressive in the Eastern Bloc, was sputtering; all of Bucharest seemed as if painted in shades of gray, and the streets were usually empty. But close friendships flourished behind shuttered windows, with a pillow tossed over the telephone and water taps running. Our cognac-fueled soirees were intense and serious. One friend claimed that the difference between the West and East was the difference between living the "superficial life" and living the "essential life."

We packed our Art Deco gym every February for the boy’s basketball tournament and, in July, thousands flocked to the East Polk County Fair for carnival rides, livestock judging, and performing dog acts. Our little town also had its share of tragedies – car crashes, house fires, robberies, and even murders – that Frank Vikan covered for the newspaper, with me tagging along as his “little helper.” And there was the mostly hidden story of my father’s struggle with alcohol and our family’s struggle to cope. Late one night my magical world was turned on its head by the sound of a gunshot – a signal that my father’s alcoholism had spiraled to the bottom. A few months later, and on the same day, he went off to the state mental hospital for drunks and I went off to college.

The Holy Shroud: A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death

Forthcoming from Pegasus Books, May 5, 2020

A towering figure in the art world unravels the mystery of the world’s most controversial relic.

The history of the Christian church is strewn with holy relics and artifacts, none more controversial than the Shroud of Turin, the supposed burial cloth of Christ. In “The Holy Shroud” Gary Vikan shows that the shroud is not the burial cloth of Jesus, but rather a photograph-like body print of a medieval Frenchman created by a brilliant artist serving the royal court in the time of the Black Death. It was gifted by King John II to his friend Geoffroi de Charny, the most renowned knight of the Middle Ages, who shortly thereafter died at the disastrous Battle of Poitiers while saving the King’s life. Though intended as nothing more than an innocuous devotional image for Geoffroi’s newly-built church in the French hamlet of Lirey, it was soon misrepresented. Miracles were faked, money was made. Combining copious research and decades of art world experience with an accessible, wry voice, Gary Vikan shows how one of the greatest hoaxes in the history of Christian relics came into being.

Sacred and Stolen: Confessions of a Museum Director

Sacred and Stolen is the memoir of an art museum director with the courage to reveal what goes on behind the scenes. It lays bare the messy part of museums: looted antiquities, crooked dealers, deluded collectors, duplicitous public officials, fakes, inside thefts, bribery, and failed exhibitions. These back stories, at once shocking and comical, reveal a man with a taste for adventure, an eagerness to fan the flames of excitement, and comfort with the chaos that often ensued.

This is also the story of a Minnesota kid who started out as a printer’s devil in his father’s small-town newspaper and ended up as the director of a the Walters, a gem of an art museum in Baltimore. Of his quest to bring the “holy” into the museum experience, and of his struggle to reconcile his passion for acquiring and displaying sacred works of art with his suspicion that they were stolen.

Among the cast of characters are the elegant French oil heiress Dominique de Menil, the notorious Turkish smuggler, Aydin Dikmen, the inscrutable and implacable Patriarchs of Ethiopia and Georgia, and the charismatic President of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze. And the mysterious “Mr. R. Egrette,” a museum insider who stole a tiny Renoir as a present for his girlfriend that finally turned up 60 years later.

From The Holy Land To Graceland: Sacred People, Places and Things In Our Lives 

Graceland is much more than a wildly popular historic house and tourist destination associated with a famous entertainer, and Elvis Presley is much more than the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. As former Walters Art Museum director and medievalist Gary Vikan shows us in his fascinating new book, Graceland, the second-most visited historic house in the U.S., is a “locus sanctus”—a holy place—and Elvis is its resident saint, while the hordes of fans that crowd Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis are modern-day pilgrims, connected in spirit and practice to their early Christian counterparts, sharing a fascination for icons and iconography, relics, souvenirs, votives, and even a belief in miracles. Vikan reveals the emergence of contemporary holy places—Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the Grassy Knoll in Dallas, Place de I’Alma in Paris—and shows us that the saints of our day are our “martyred” secular charismatics, from Elvis to John F. Kennedy, Princess Diana, Michael Jackson, and others.

Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art

Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art explores the portable artifacts of eastern Mediterranean pilgrimage from the fifth to the seventh century, presenting them in the context of contemporary pilgrims’ texts and the archaeology of sacred sites. The book shows how the iconography and devotional piety of Byzantine pilgrimage art changed, and it surveys the material and social culture of pilgrimage. What did these early religious travelers take home with them and what did they leave behind? Where were these “sacred souvenirs” manufactured and what was their purpose? How did the images imprinted upon many of them help realize that purpose? The first edition of this pathbreaking book, published in 1982, established late antique pilgrimage and its artifacts as an important topic of study. In this revised, enlarged version, Gary Vikan significantly expands the narrative by situating the miraculous world of the early Byzantine pilgrim within the context of late antique magic and pre-Christian healing shrines, and by considering the trajectory of pilgrimage after the Arab conquest of the seventh century.