A bronze statue of Melania Trump near her hometown in Slovenia has gone missing, five years after it replaced a wooden statue damaged by arsonists.
Slovenian police told CNN that they’d been informed of a theft in the village of Rozno, where the statue was situated, on Tuesday.
Officers “conducted an inspection of the crime scene and collected information,” police spokesperson Alenka Drenik Rangus said in a statement Friday. “The investigating judge and the district state prosecutor were informed about the theft.”
No further details were given by authorities.
Photos published in Slovenian local media show most of the statue has been sawed off, leaving just its feet and ankles attached to the tree trunk it stood on.
The statue was situated beside a river near Sevnica, a small, picturesque town about 90 kilometers (56 miles) east of Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana.
Before this bronze statue was stolen, its original wooden incarnation was set alight in July 2020 by vandals. Badly burnt, it was then removed from its plinth before being displayed at an art gallery in the Slovenian town of Koper later that year and at an exhibition in Croatia in 2023.
Artist Brad Downey told CNN that he had always intended to make a bronze version of the statue to exhibit in an institutional setting, but decided to use it to replace the wooden sculpture after it was badly burned.
Downey had originally commissioned the wooden sculpture from local conceptual artist Ales Zupevc, better known as Maxi, who was born in the same hospital and the same year as Melania Trump.
Its somewhat abstract depiction of the first lady in the sky-blue dress she wore to her husband’s first presidential inauguration in 2017 drew mixed reviews from locals.
Sevnica is a sleepy town of 5,000 that has profited from its most famous daughter, placing itself firmly on the tourist trail and selling a range of Melania-themed products, including honey, chocolate and cake.
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