NCS
—
A bronze statue of Melania Trump close to her hometown in Slovenia has gone lacking, 5 years after it changed a wooden statue damaged by arsonists.
Slovenian police advised NCS that they’d been knowledgeable of a theft within the village of Rozno, the place the statue was located, on Tuesday.
Officers “conducted an inspection of the crime scene and collected information,” police spokesperson Alenka Drenik Rangus stated in a press release Friday. “The investigating judge and the district state prosecutor were informed about the theft.”
No additional particulars got by authorities.
Photos printed in Slovenian native media present a lot of the statue has been sawed off, leaving simply its ft and ankles hooked up to the tree trunk it stood on.
The statue was located beside a river close to Sevnica, a small, picturesque city about 90 kilometers (56 miles) east of Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana.
Before this bronze statue was stolen, its authentic picket incarnation was set alight in July 2020 by vandals. Badly burnt, it was then faraway from its plinth earlier than being displayed at an artwork gallery within the Slovenian city of Koper later that 12 months and at an exhibition in Croatia in 2023.
Artist Brad Downey advised NCS that he had all the time supposed to make a bronze model of the statue to exhibit in an institutional setting, however determined to make use of it to interchange the picket sculpture after it was badly burned.
Downey had initially commissioned the picket sculpture from native conceptual artist Ales Zupevc, higher often called Maxi, who was born in the identical hospital and the identical 12 months as Melania Trump.
Its considerably summary depiction of the primary girl within the sky-blue gown she wore to her husband’s first presidential inauguration in 2017 drew blended evaluations from locals.
Sevnica is a sleepy city of 5,000 that has profited from its most well-known daughter, putting itself firmly on the vacationer path and promoting a spread of Melania-themed merchandise, together with honey, chocolate and cake.