Selling Cypriot Antiquities Legally: A Step-by-Step Guide

Export licence No. 2655 was issued in Cyprus on 6 November 1953. The printed form, headed "Licence to Export Antiquities" and issued under the Antiquities Law of 1935, carries a handwritten list: one red polished jug with spout, one base ring juglet, two Iron Age geometric plates, Roman lamps, most items followed by a stock number. The Director of Antiquities certified the pieces "examined and passed for export by me and sealed in my presence", and the licence was valid for two years [1]. A buyer of any of those objects today, whether an auction house, a dealer or a museum, will ask the seller for that sheet of paper or something that does the same job.

This guide takes an owner through selling an inherited Cypriot collection in order, from the first inventory to the sale. It assumes you know roughly what you have. If you are still deciding whether to sell at all, read the owner's guide to inherited Cypriot antiquities and your options first; for antiquities from other countries, see the general guide to selling antiquities.

Is it legal to sell Cypriot antiquities?

Yes, outside Cyprus, for objects that left the island lawfully, and lawful export was possible under licence until 1996 [2]. Inside the Republic, the Antiquities Law has provided since 1996 that no person may deal in antiquities, so a collection held in Cyprus cannot be sold or exported [2]. Abroad, three sets of rules matter as of 2026:

• In the United Kingdom, the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act 2003 makes it an offence to deal dishonestly in an object unlawfully excavated or removed after 30 December 2003 [4]. It is not retrospective, so for a piece that left Cyprus before then it is essentially irrelevant [5]. Export from Britain may also need a licence from Arts Council England, depending on the object's age and value; the UK selling guide covers the detail.
• In the United States, import restrictions have applied to Byzantine church material since 1999 and to designated Cypriot archaeological objects since 2002; the current agreement, signed at Nicosia in June 2022, runs to July 2027 [6]. Objects already in the country before the restrictions are unaffected; objects imported now need evidence that they left Cyprus lawfully. See the US selling guide.
• In the European Union, Regulation 2019/880 has required, since 28 June 2025, an import licence for archaeological objects over 250 years old entering from outside the EU, granted on evidence of lawful export [7]. A Cypriot jug sold in London to a buyer in Paris needs that file.

This is general information about the law as of 2026, not legal advice. For a valuable piece or an unusual case, a cultural-property lawyer is worth the fee.

Step 1: Make an inventory without disturbing anything

Photograph every object before anything is moved, cleaned or split between heirs. Give each piece a number on a list (never on the object), and record its height, condition and every mark: labels, wires, ink numbers, old repairs. Objects that were bought or found together should stay together, because a group with one licence is worth more as a group, in money and in evidence, than its parts sold apart. Keep the boxes and wrapping too; a dealer's label sometimes survives only on the packaging. If you are an executor, the guide to antiquities in an estate adds the probate side.

Step 2: Identify each piece correctly

A sale description has to name the ware, the shape and the period, and an error here costs money and credibility. "Ancient Cypriot jug" sells worse than "Bichrome IV trefoil jug, Cypro-Archaic I, c. 750 to 600 BCE". Use the visual key to Cypriot pottery to get close, and check for replicas and over-restoration with the guide to Cypriot replicas and fakes; a heavy restoration is common in old collections and is fine to sell, provided it is disclosed. If you are unsure, send us photographs and we will identify the pieces for you.

Step 3: Build the provenance file

The provenance file is the single document that decides whether, where and for how much a Cypriot piece can be sold. It is a chain of owners with dates, and every link should rest on something a buyer can check.

Start with the physical evidence: a lead export seal, a numbered export licence, a Cyprus Museum sales ticket or register number, a licensed dealer's stock list, a painted museum number. The owner's guide explains which marks to look for, and the guide to Cypriot export licences, seals and labels shows how to read each one. Then add the family evidence: letters, postings, photographs of the pieces in the house, and a signed note of who acquired them, where and when. Dates of residence in Cyprus anchor everything else, and the guide for families whose pieces were brought home from Cyprus shows how to test a story against them.

Two cautions come from real cases. Licences were sometimes made out in the dealer's name: licence No. 2655 is signed by the dealer Petros Kolokasides, and the buyer who took the objects home appears nowhere on it [1], so your family's name may be missing from a genuine licence. And wording drifts. The collection of James Brew, an art teacher in Cyprus in the 1960s, was described in two 2019 sale catalogues as "acquired 1970s to 1980s", when a lamp inscribed "Paphos 1965, J.A. Brew" and his 1972 loan to the Ashmolean Museum, from which two of his plank figures were published in 1983, put it a decade earlier [8]. Write down what the documents say, with their dates, and nothing rounder. An honest "family tradition, unverified" is worth more to a careful buyer than a confident phrase that fails the first check. Where permits were lost, as they often were [3], say so plainly.

Step 4: Ask the Department of Antiquities and run the stolen-art checks

Before offering anything for sale, check it. The Department of Antiquities in Nicosia can confirm, from good photographs or the object itself, whether a licence number or lead tag matches its archive and whether the piece appears on any register of stolen objects; it did exactly this for a Bichrome bowl bought from Kolokasides in the 1950s or 1960s, with its lead tag still attached [2]. Auction houses run their own searches of stolen-art databases such as the Art Loss Register, and a seller who has done this first, with a clean result on file, saves time and arouses no suspicion.

Pay particular attention to the classes most associated with looting after 1974: Byzantine icons, frescoes and church furnishings; Bronze Age material of the kinds found in the cemeteries of the Kyrenia coast, such as fine Red Polished ware and plank figures; and anything that resembles a published stolen object. The compendium entry on looting in occupied northern Cyprus gives the background.

Step 5: Get a realistic idea of value

Ask for an auction estimate from more than one house, or a written valuation from an independent valuer, and treat both as ranges. Unsold lots are common in this market and estimates are a different thing from prices. Cypriot pottery is inexpensive by antiquities standards, often a few hundred pounds a piece [11], and a documented history can lift a price well above comparable lots, as it did for a limestone head deaccessioned from the Cesnola collection [2]. The guide to what a Cypriot antiquity is worth explains how ware, condition, restoration and provenance combine. We can suggest independent valuers but do not value objects ourselves.

Step 6: Choose how to sell

There are three routes, and the provenance file decides which are open.

1. An established auction house with an antiquities department. It will run due diligence, write the catalogue entry and reach international buyers. It will also turn down pieces whose files are thin, and may report a suspected stolen object to the authorities.
2. A specialist antiquities dealer outside Cyprus who belongs to a trade association with a code of practice (there have been no licensed dealers on the island since 1996). Dealers buy outright or sell on commission, and a good one will ask for the same provenance file an auction house does.
3. A direct sale or part-gift to a museum. Museums rarely buy Cypriot pottery, which they hold in quantity, but a well-documented group, an unusual type or a piece linked to a known excavation can interest a university or regional collection. Most museums follow the 1970 UNESCO date in their acquisition codes, so the file needs to reach back before 1970 or show a lawful export after it.

Avoid selling through general online marketplaces. They carry no due diligence, buyers there cannot easily verify a provenance, and a reputable piece sold that way loses the price its history should have earned. Whatever the route, if the buyer is abroad, the export and import rules above apply: from Britain the UK guide explains the Arts Council licensing, and nothing should travel without its paperwork.

What if the checks turn up a problem?

Stop the sale. If the Department of Antiquities identifies a piece as stolen or illegally exported, or the stolen-art search returns a match, the piece cannot lawfully be sold, and trying to sell it exposes the seller to seizure and possible prosecution. Voluntary return is the usual way through, and in 2023 and 2024 the Department announced returns from the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom [10]. The guide to returning or donating Cypriot antiquities explains how a return is arranged and what happens to the owner. A problem with one piece rarely taints a whole collection; the rest can usually still be sold once it is set aside.

Which pieces are better kept, lent or donated?

Some are worth more to the record than to the market. A Cypriot private collection published in full becomes a source for scholars, and the declared Nicosia collections catalogued by Vassos Karageorghis for the A. G. Leventis Foundation, among them the Phylactou collection, are cited in research to this day [9]. If a group in your collection is still together with its original licence or its dealer's list, consider whether to sell it as a group, offer it to a museum, or have it photographed and published before it is dispersed. The amphora shown above, sold from the Cyprus Museum's own Sales Register as SR 3477/65, stayed in the collection of the United Nations officer who bought it until 2025, and that one register number is why its history can be printed in a single line.

AncientCyprus.com is a free, non-commercial site run by the Antiquity Preservation Fund. We help owners identify Cypriot antiquities, research their provenance and understand the options, and we 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 conduct is set out in our cultural heritage policy.