Inherited Cypriot Antiquities? What You Have and Your Options

A United Nations officer posted to Cyprus in the 1960s bought a 42 cm Bichrome amphora directly from the Cyprus Museum. The Museum entered the sale in its own Sales Register as SR 3477/65, the jar left the island with him in 1969, and it stayed in his collection until 2025. It is now in this site's collection, and its history fits in a single line of a catalogue entry.

Most Cypriot antiquities in family homes have a story of that shape: bought legally on the island by a soldier, a civil servant, a teacher or a tourist, carried home in the luggage, and handed down. What usually goes missing is the paper. This guide is for owners and heirs who want to know what they have, what the marks and documents on it mean, whether it is legal to keep, and what they can do with it. If you have already decided to sell, the companion guide on selling an inherited Cypriot collection step by step covers the process. If you are not sure your pieces are Cypriot at all, start with what to do with inherited antiquities.

What kind of Cypriot antiquity do I have?

Most likely a pot. Pottery from the Bronze Age and Iron Age, clay lamps, Hellenistic and Roman glass and small terracotta figures make up the great majority of Cypriot material in private hands, because they were what the licensed trade sold. Dealers and the Cyprus Museum's own saleroom handled Iron Age pottery, lamps and glass by the thousand and very little fine sculpture [1]. The table gives the commonest kinds and what to look for; our visual key to Cypriot pottery goes ware by ware with photographs.

Two other possibilities come up often. One is a replica. Copies of Red Polished and Bichrome pots have long been sold to visitors in Cyprus, and in the 1930s the Department of Antiquities was already warning tourists, in notices placed in their hotels, that imitations were made and circulated on the island [5]. The other is a piece heavily restored or assembled from fragments, which is common in old collections and no cause for alarm. The guide to Cypriot replicas and fakes explains how to tell them apart.

Is it legal to own a Cypriot antiquity?

Outside Cyprus, yes. Owning a Cypriot antiquity is lawful in Britain, the United States and the European Union, provided the object left the island while export was permitted and nothing dishonest has happened to it since. Inside the Republic of Cyprus the position is different: antiquities belong to the state, private owners may keep collections declared to the Department of Antiquities but may not sell or export them, and Article 27 of the Antiquities Law now allows export only for temporary exhibition or scientific study [4]. This page is general information about the law as of 2026, not legal advice.

When could antiquities leave Cyprus legally?

For more than a century, through 1996. The rule most people have heard, that an antiquity needs papers from before 1970, comes from the 1970 UNESCO Convention, which binds states rather than owners, is not retroactive, and was ratified by Cyprus only in 1979 [15][8]. Museums and auction houses use 1970 as a working benchmark. Cypriot law ran on its own dates [4][6][7], and for much of the century the Cyprus Museum was itself a seller [1][2].

Until 1996, in Fehlmann's summary, export was permitted so long as the Department had issued a licence, and thousands of pieces left that way [8]. The licences were numbered in sequence: the permits now in the Malios collection in Leipzig run from number 550 of March 1935 to number 7070 of January 1978 [3]. The full legal history is set out in the compendium entry on the legal export of Cypriot antiquities and told as a story in Licence No. 7070.

What marks and papers should I look for?

Look at the object first, then the drawers. Each lawful channel left its own kind of evidence, and any one of these changes what your piece is worth and how easily it can be sold, donated or published.

• A lead seal on a wire. When it licensed an export, the Department wired a small lead tag to the handle of the piece; the one on the jug shown on this page is stamped C.M. The Department can match tags and licence numbers against its archive, as it did for a Bichrome bowl bought from the Nicosia dealer Petros Kolokasides in the 1950s or 1960s [4].
• A numbered export licence: a printed form headed "Licence to Export Antiquities", with a number, a date, a list of objects and the Director's signature. Some owners framed them; Ethel Inman, who bought four small pieces in 1937 and 1939, had the permits framed and the objects chained to them [3].
• A Cyprus Museum ticket or register number. Saleroom stock carried dated tickets lettered in Greek, English and Turkish, and later sales were entered in the Sales Register with numbers like SR 3477/65 [1][2].
• A dealer's label, stock number or typed list. A. H. S. Megaw, Director of Antiquities from 1936, licensed three dealers, among them Petros Kolokasides of Nicosia [5]; George Basil Palma of Famagusta filed monthly returns of his sales with the Department [9].
• A painted or inked number. A Metropolitan Museum number in the 74.51 series, or a label from the Met's 1928 sale of Cesnola "duplicates", traces a deaccessioned piece to Luigi Palma di Cesnola in the nineteenth century [10]. British Museum excavation finds of the 1890s were given to schools and museums across Britain, and some later left with a museum number on them [11].
• Family paper: postings, letters home, photographs of the shelf in 1962, a receipt in a desk. Dates of residence on the island matter more than anything else here.

The guide to Cypriot export licences, seals and labels shows what each of these looks like. One practical warning: lead seals and export numbers were "often removed largely for aesthetic reasons" [3]. A small hole or a wire mark on a handle can be the ghost of a seal, so note it in your photographs before anyone cleans the piece.

My pieces have no paperwork. Are they looted?

Probably not. The researchers who reassembled the Malios collection in Leipzig found that export permits "were often lost" over decades in private hands, so a large population of lawfully exported objects has shed the proof of its export [3]. A Bichrome juglet in a grandparent's cabinet with no paper is, on the evidence, far more likely to be one of those than a looted piece.

Looting is real, though, and in Cyprus it belongs mostly to the decades after July 1974, when more than a third of the island passed beyond the reach of the Department [7]. Churches in the occupied north were stripped: the thirteenth-century frescoes of a church near Lysi were cut from the walls, smuggled to Munich, bought by the Menil Foundation of Houston in 1984 and returned in 2012 [12]. Certain kinds of object therefore deserve a closer look: Byzantine icons, frescoes and church furnishings of any kind; Bronze Age material of the types found in the cemeteries of the Kyrenia coast, such as Lapithos, including fine Red Polished ware and plank figures; and anything that matches a published stolen object. The test that works best is consistency between object and story. Visitors in the 1950s and 1960s bought Iron Age jugs, lamps and glass; a complete plank figure with no history at all is a different case. The compendium entry on looting in occupied northern Cyprus sets out what is known, and the guide for families whose pieces were brought home from Cyprus shows how to test a family story against the dates.

What is my Cypriot antiquity worth?

Usually hundreds of pounds, sometimes much more, and provenance moves the figure as much as the object does. Red Polished pottery commonly sells for a few hundred pounds and an Archaic limestone head rarely for more than ten thousand [8]. A history that reaches back to a named source raises the price: a limestone votive head deaccessioned from the Cesnola collection opened at an American online auction at nearly 30,000 dollars, well above comparable lots, which a 2017 study of the illicit trade put down to its "safe" acquisition history [4]. The guide to what a Cypriot antiquity is worth explains price drivers and probate valuations; we can point you to independent valuers but do not value objects ourselves.

What are my options?

You have four, and none needs deciding in a hurry.

Keep it

Most owners do. Store pots on a stable shelf away from radiators and damp, leave old labels, seals and repairs exactly as they are, keep any group of objects together, and write down the family story now, with names and years, while someone still remembers it. If you are dealing with an estate, the guide for executors handling antiquities covers inventory and probate.

Sell it

A documented Cypriot piece that left the island lawfully can be sold, and the selling guide walks through building a provenance file and choosing a sale route. The rules differ by country: see the guides to selling in the UK and in the US.

Lend or publish it

Private pieces become useful to scholars once they are photographed and described. James Brew, an art teacher at British forces schools in Cyprus in the 1960s, lent his collection to the Ashmolean Museum in 1972, and his two multi-headed plank figures were published there as nos. 151 and 152 [13]. Their story is told in the Brew plank figures.

Donate it or return it to Cyprus

Museums accept gifts with a clear history, and the Department of Antiquities receives voluntary returns; in 2023 and 2024 it announced returns from the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom [14]. The guide to returning or donating Cypriot antiquities explains how each works and what happens to the donor.

What should I do first?

1. Leave the pieces as they are: no washing, gluing or removing labels and wires.
2. Photograph each one from several sides, with a ruler, plus close-ups of any marks, numbers, seals or repairs.
3. Gather every paper you can find, including letters and photographs that show the pieces in the family home.
4. Write down who acquired them, where and when, and when that person lived in or visited Cyprus.
5. Send us the photos and we will tell you what we think you have.

AncientCyprus.com is a free, non-commercial site run by the Antiquity Preservation Fund. We identify Cypriot antiquities, help owners research provenance, explain the options, and point to specialists such as conservators, independent valuers and cultural-property lawyers. We do not sell or broker antiquities, issue formal valuations or give legal advice. Our own collection is published piece by piece with its ownership history, under the rules in our cultural heritage policy, and the Bichrome amphora at the top of this page is one of them, SR 3477/65 and all.