© lookphotos. "Turkish flag in front of the Sultanahmet or Blue Mosque, Istanbul, Turkey.

There are very few recent accounts of the artifacts, with the latest information directly from the Smithsonian being from 2022. There is a discussion within one of the articles about the Trojan artifacts in Smithsonian Magazine that says that the artifacts are dispersed within about 45 collections across the world, with archeologists studying Troy spending lots of time attempting to persuade countries who have acquired the artifacts over time to return them to be placed within a Troy Museum. In 2012, the Turkish Government reached out to the curator of the University of Pennsylvania’s Mediterranean Collection to examine 24 artifacts, which were technically protected under a 1970 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) treaty prohibiting museums from acquiring objects that left their country of origin after 1970 without full documentation. Still, the objects were granted on loan to the Troy museum in exchange for a license permitting excavations at Gordion, the capital of the eighth-century B.C. Phrygian Empire, in central Anatolia. As of 2022, Turkey had not approached the Smithsonian about repatriation of the objects, but the Curator of Biological Anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, Dr. Sabrina Sholts, does say that under the institution's framework, the objects would be considered good candidates for consideration for ethical return.