The Antiquities Trade and Cyprus

The sales counter of the Cyprus Museum saleroom in Nicosia, c. 1930 (collection of R. S. Merrillees, gift of J. du Plat Taylor)

Cypriot antiquities fill museums from Stockholm to New York, and most of them left the island lawfully. This section sets out how that happened, what the illicit digging and trafficking of the same years amounted to in the south and, after the Turkish invasion of 1974, in the occupied north, and what the record means for anyone who owns, buys or studies Cypriot objects today. Each looting entry is set beside the lawful trade of the same period and place.

How Cypriot antiquities left the island lawfully

The Swedish Cyprus Expedition excavating the settlement at Lapithos-Plakes in 1927 (photo: John Lindros, Swedish Cyprus Expedition, Medelhavsmuseet, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Cesnola Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art runs to some 35,000 objects. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition, whose work in 1927 included the settlement at Plakes near Lapithos, shipped about two thirds of its 18,000 finds to Stockholm between 1930 and 1931 under a division agreed with the colonial government [2]. The British Museum, the Louvre, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Ashmolean and dozens of smaller collections hold Cypriot material acquired in the same decades. None of this was smuggled. For a century and a quarter the island had a lawful channel for the export of antiquities, and the channel was used on a scale that no other Mediterranean country matched in proportion to its size.

The channel took different forms in different eras. Under the Ottomans there was at first no antiquities statute at all: a foreigner dug under a personal Imperial firman, and a well-drafted firman exempted the finds from customs, which is to say it licensed their export [1]. The Ottoman regulation of 1874 introduced the principle of partage, the division of a licensed excavation's finds into thirds between the state, the excavator and the landowner, and Britain kept that regulation in force when it took over the administration of Cyprus in 1878 [1]. The colonial Antiquities Law of 1905 required the High Commissioner's written permission for export; the law of 1935 created the Department of Antiquities and replaced permission with a licence issued by its Director. From the 1920s to 1991 the Cyprus Museum ran its own saleroom, disposing of surplus tomb pottery to visitors and, later, through a Sales Register that the Director in 1983 described as encouraging exports to universities and museums [3; 5, p. 364]. Licensed dealers such as Petros Kolokasides traded openly in Nicosia under licence for decades, and private collections formed in the Republic between 1963 and 1973 were registered card by card with the Department's knowledge [4]. The lawful trade in private antiquities finally closed with the amendment of 1996 [6]. The entry on the legal export of Cypriot antiquities traces each of these regimes and tabulates the dates. How many objects left through each channel is estimated in how many Cypriot antiquities left lawfully.

Looting in the south and in the occupied north

The hinge in the story is July 1974. The Turkish invasion and the occupation that followed removed about 37 per cent of the island from the reach of the Department of Antiquities: Salamis, Enkomi, Lapithos, Soli, Vouni, the district museum at Famagusta, the castle at Kyrenia, and several hundred churches with their icons, frescoes and mosaics [8]. A regulated trade with registers and licences became, north of the line, no trade at all in the legal sense, and the objects that began to surface abroad in the following years had no paperwork because there was no authority left to issue any. The best-known case reached an American courtroom: the sixth-century mosaics stripped from the church of the Panagia Kanakaria in the Karpas were bought in 1988 by an Indianapolis dealer and returned to the Church of Cyprus after a federal trial in 1989 and an appeal in 1990 [7]. The entry on looting in the occupied north summarises the period, and the entries on the occupied north after 1974 follow the sites, the cases and the recoveries one by one.

The looting of the north had a shape. Opportunist raids in the first years were followed, from about 1977 to 1982, by an organised trade aimed above all at the churches, and that trade faded in the 1990s and ended with the deaths of the men who ran it. What it handled was mostly church art, icons, frescoes and mosaics, which is a different trade from archaeology with its own buyers and prices; why the two should be counted apart is set out in church art and antiquities, and the people and court cases in people and networks. In the Republic-controlled south, illicit digging went on before and after 1974 as it had for a century, mostly by single finders near known sites, and was reported and prosecuted; the few organised cases and the policing are covered in the Republic after 1974, beside the licensed export that continued there until 1996.

What the evidence shows

The figures most often quoted for what was taken from Cyprus, where each comes from and what it counts are examined in how much was taken. Looting Cyprus has rarely paid: an ordinary Cypriot pot sells for a few hundred pounds or dollars, the supply from 150 years of lawful export is very large, and an undocumented piece is discounted and pushed to the cheapest venues, as the economics of looting sets out with its exceptions. The state and its partners were themselves buyers in the market for decades, recorded item by item in the state and foundations as buyers. And the year 1974, which the invasion made the date-line, now works as a presumption against any undocumented Cypriot object, although the documented history runs the other way; that argument is made in the 1974 presumption.

Owning Cypriot antiquities today

The two histories meet in the present, on the desk of anyone deciding whether an object may be bought, published or kept. An object whose history can be traced to a firman, a partage division, a colonial permission, a 1935 licence or a Cyprus Museum sale is a lawful object, and there are tens of thousands of them. An object with no history before 1974 deserves the questions that the entry on collecting Cypriot antiquities today sets out, together with the case for what a documented private collection can do: photograph, publish, scan and lend, as this site's own collection tries to. Since licensed export ended in 1996 the market abroad has lived on old stock, sold again as collections and estates come up; that market is described in the trade since 1996. The conventions and import rules that now apply, and how an owner documents a lawful history, are in law and provenance. An owner with a question about a particular piece can get in touch.

The articles on how Cyprus's past was sold, private collecting of Cypriot antiquities and UNESCO 1970 and the ethics of modern collections tell parts of this story at length; the entries below are the reference versions.

How this section is organised

The section has eight parts, set out below in the order a reader new to the subject might take them. Reading the evidence weighs the numbers, dates, prices and documents behind every claim. Digging and the lawful trade before 1974 runs from Ottoman tomb-digging and firmans to the collections registered under the Republic. The occupied north after 1974 and the Republic after 1974 cover the two parts of the island after the invasion. The trade since 1996 covers the modern market, online sales, coins, fakes and finds from the sea. The state and foundations as buyers records the purchases of the Cyprus Museum, its partners and the Church. Law and provenance covers the conventions, import rules, recoveries and proof of a lawful history, and people and networks the dealers, excavators and court cases.

From the collection

and 9 more objects linked from these pages

References

1.Stanley-Price, N. (2001). The Ottoman law on antiquities (1874) and the founding of the Cyprus Museum. In V. Tatton-Brown (Ed.), Cyprus in the 19th century AD: Fact, fancy and fiction. Papers of the 22nd British Museum Classical Colloquium, December 1998 (pp. 267-275). Oxbow Books.
2.Göransson, K. (2012). The Swedish Cyprus Expedition: The Cyprus collections in Stockholm and the Swedish excavations after the SCE. In A. Georgiou (Ed.), Cyprus: An island culture. Society and social relations from the Bronze Age to the Venetian period (pp. 399-408). Oxbow Books.
3.Stanley-Price, N. (2025). Illicit excavation and the sale of 'duplicate' antiquities: Rupert Gunnis and the Cyprus Museum, 1926-1932. Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes, 55, 269-301. https://doi.org/10.4000/151c2
4.Karageorghis, V. (1976). The illicit sale of Cypriot antiquities [Letter]. Antiquity, 50(199-200), 233-234. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00108336
5.Herscher, E. (1983). The antiquities market: News and commentary on the illicit traffic in antiquities. Journal of Field Archaeology, 10(3), 349-369. https://doi.org/10.1179/009346983791504327
6.Alphas, E. (2017). From a Bronze Age tomb in Cyprus to the estate of a gentleman in Sussex: Measures taken and problems faced in the investigations on the illicit trade of antiquities. In D. Pilides & M. Mina (Eds.), Four decades of hiatus in archaeological research in Cyprus: Towards restoring the balance. Department of Antiquities, Cyprus.
7.Autocephalous Greek-Orthodox Church of Cyprus v. Goldberg & Feldman Fine Arts, Inc., 717 F. Supp. 1374 (S.D. Ind. 1989), aff'd 917 F.2d 278 (7th Cir. 1990).
8.Jansen, M. (2005). War and cultural heritage: Cyprus after the 1974 Turkish invasion (Minnesota Mediterranean and East European Monographs 14). University of Minnesota.