Licensed Dealers and Registered Collections: The 1935 System and Its Record, to 1974

From 1935 until 1996 it was lawful in Cyprus to deal in antiquities under a licence, and lawful to own a private collection that had been declared to the Department of Antiquities. The Antiquities Law of 1935 set up both: dealers held a licence from the Director, filed returns of what they bought and sold, and submitted their stock for inspection before export; collectors declared what they owned, and the Department kept the declarations on file. Between 1963 and 1973 the same law was used to register every object in the island's private collections on a card with a description and a photograph, a task completed in December 1973 [6, p. 233]. The dealers' licences, the collectors' declarations and the cards of 1973 are the paper record of the lawful trade on the island before the Turkish invasion, and the last of them still identifies stolen objects today. The image at the head of this page is the letterhead of a sale note typed by the licensed Nicosia dealer Petros Kolokasides on 2 November 1953: "Antiques Dealer & Persian Carpets, 3, Onassagoras Str. & 42, Hippocrates Str., Nicosia", recording that he "sold to Mr. Walter J. Beasley, the following Antique pieces from my collection". The document is reproduced in full in the article on Kolokasides.

Before 1935: registration under the 1905 law

Registration was older than licensed dealing. The Antiquities Law of 1905 laid down rules for registering private collections, alongside the rules on chance finds, excavation permits and export [8, p. 274]. The curator Menelaos Markides registered the private collections held in Larnaca and hoped to do the same in other towns, and he kept export permits to fewer than twenty a year [8, p. 275]. One early registration is known in detail: the collection of Epaminondas Skeparnides of Trikomo, including sixteen stone statues, "was registered with the Cyprus Museum in 1906 (No. 141)" [2, p. 408]. Skeparnides declared his collection again to the new Department on 30 April 1936, and in 1937 a further 237 small objects were confiscated from him and deposited in the Museum [2, p. 408].

The resident middleman was also older than the licence. In 1889 the Archbishop of Cyprus sold the landowner's share of the finds from the excavations at Tamassos, much of it now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, "through the agency of Evstathios Constantinides, at one time a member of the Council of the Cyprus Museum and himself a collector of antiquities" [10, p. 261]. The earlier trade is described in firmans and partage and the laws themselves in the 1905 and 1935 laws.

The 1935 licensed-dealer regime

The 1935 law made the resident dealer a licensed trader. A. H. S. Megaw, who became Director of Antiquities in 1936, placed notices in the hotels used by foreign visitors: "Visitors are urgently requested to purchase antiquities only from dealers displaying a license from the Department of Antiquities ... To neglect this precaution is directly to encourage illegal excavation" [1]. When tourists complained of the journey from Famagusta to Nicosia for export licences, he began to inspect the licensed dealers' stock himself and approve objects for sale and export, believing it "in the interests of the Department to stimulate the trade in antiquities through the authorised channels" [1].

The working of a licence is recorded in the file of the Famagusta dealer George Basil Palma, now in the State Archives in Nicosia as Department file No. 24/37. It opens with Palma's letter of 31 January 1937 containing "a nil return for antiquities bought and sold during January 1937"; his licence was renewed for 1938 [2, p. 409]. Throughout 1937 he submitted consignments to the Department for export licences, usually brought to the Museum by one of his children. They were "just as regularly approved", except for objects of exceptional quality or value that were refused export; some of those were bought by or given to the Museum, and the rest were returned to Palma, who sold them to other collectors and dealers on the island [2, p. 409].

The licence that went with an exported object was a printed form numbered in sequence. A surviving example reads "Government of Cyprus. Department of Antiquities. No. 2655. Licence to Export Antiquities. Issued under the Antiquities Law, 1935. [Antiquities (Licence to Export) Regulations, 1936.]", and is reproduced in the Kolokasides article. Objects passed for export were sealed with a small lead tag, usually stamped C.M. for Cyprus Museum. The Department keeps copies of the old licences: an export licence of 20 October 1964 offered with a Red Polished jug at Bonhams in 2014 was matched in its archive to a jug bought "for the price of eight Cyprus pounds by an American national from an authorised antiquities' dealer in Cyprus on the 28th September 1964" [5]. How to read these papers is set out in the article on export licences and labels.

The licensed dealers in the record

Powell writes that Megaw licensed three approved dealers, one of whom was Kolokasides [1]. The record names more than three across the period, and the Famagusta file shows at least two licensed dealers in that district alone in 1937, Palma and the architect Francis Milverton Drake, a skilled draftsman who wrote a guide to the city [2, pp. 409–410].

Petros Kolokasides, Nicosia. Karageorghis catalogued his Mycenaean vases in 1965 among the island's private collections and described him in one sentence: "Petros Kolokassides is a licenced dealer in Antiquities in Nicosia, and at the same time a collector. His Mycenaean vases were acquired from various sources throughout the island" [3]. His sales reached private buyers abroad and museums. A Bichrome bowl in the collection of the botanist Oleg Polunin, "acquired during the 1950s–1960s from P. Kolokasides, Cyprus", still had its "Cyprus Museum lead export tag attached to the handle" and an old typed card with a photograph when it was offered in London in 2016, and the Department verified it from its archive [5]. Four vases in the Ahlstrand Collection, now in the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm, came from him in the 1950s [4]. His life and papers are in the Kolokasides article; his sales in the record are set out in Petros Kolokasides.

George Basil Palma, Famagusta. A pharmacist whose Phoenix Pharmacy in Varosha doubled as a shop, Palma declared the largest private collection in the Famagusta district in March 1936 and held a dealer's licence from at least 1937 [2, p. 409]. His buyers included residents of Kyrenia and Famagusta, Drake among them, and customers in England, among them a Cambridge professor of zoology and the composer Granville Bantock, who bought a Roman terracotta figurine with a lyre [2, pp. 409–410]. He also sold to the state: the purchases register lists eight purchases by the Cyprus Museum from Palma between 1936 and 1951, among them a miniature copper oxhide ingot with two Cypro-Minoan signs.

George Petrakides, Larnaca. Merrillees names him with Kolokasides as one of the dealers of the 20th century [2, p. 423]. The Swedish collector John Ahlstrand bought four pots from him in the 1950s, and two vases Petrakides had sold to the Cyprus Museum were sold on by the Museum to Ahlstrand in 1953 [4].

Beyond the named dealers, the Cyprus Museum's published acquisitions record purchases from unnamed "antiquities dealers" in many years between 1958 and 1973, among them limestone heads, Iron Age vases and coin hoards, listed in the purchases register and discussed in the state as buyer. The Museum's own counter, which sold to the same customers, is described in the Cyprus Museum saleroom.

Declared collections from 1935

The second half of the system was the register of declared private collections. The Famagusta file is the one described in print: file No. 94/35, "Objects and Collections Declared by Private Individuals. Famagusta District", in the State Archives. It contains Palma's letter of 17 March 1936 "enclosing a full list of antiquities in his possession", and Merrillees counts "30 odd private collections of various sizes in Famagusta and Varosha declared to the Department of Antiquities in 1935 and 1936" [2, p. 409]. The number of the file implies a series by district; the others have not been published. When Merrillees presented his work on Palma in 2007, the then Director of Antiquities pointed to this register as "a test of their legitimacy" [2, p. 409].

Declared collections had a recognised standing. Merrillees writes that "the Department of Antiquities accepted then as now that these collections had an historical status, however formed, and could be studied and published with impunity" [2, p. 423], and Karageorghis published several of them in the 1960s, beginning with the first Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum volume of Cypriot private collections in 1965 [3].

The registration of 1973 and export afterwards

Between 1963 and 1973 private collecting grew sharply under the conditions described in collecting under the silent accord. At its end every object in the island's private collections was recorded. Karageorghis wrote: "All these collections have been registered (there is a card with a description and photograph of every single item). This gigantic work ended in December 1973" [6, p. 233]. One of the people who did the work was Ellen Herscher, who as a Fulbright scholar from 1972 to 1974 "worked with the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus to register and catalogue private collections on the island, a procedure required under a new antiquities law" [7, p. 349]; she catalogued an outstanding Famagusta collection in 1973 [7, p. 362].

The cut-off governed export afterwards. In 1983 Karageorghis set out the policy: "Objects which were legally acquired and duly registered by December 31, 1973, and which are not needed by the Cyprus Museum, can be exported with a permit from the Department of Antiquities" [7, p. 364]. Licensed dealing and licensed export continued on that basis until the law was amended in 1996, as described in the legal export of Cypriot antiquities. The collections themselves, most of them now in public hands, are set out in the island collections.

Why the cards still identify objects

The 1973 record is the reason stolen objects from registered collections can be identified. After the invasion Karageorghis wrote: "We have complete records of all antiquities which have been left in the occupied part of Cyprus; one day we will be able to claim them back, we hope" [6, p. 234].

Two cases from the occupied north show the record at work. Objects marked with the initials "OHL" and numbers were seized in 1975 from the shop of the mayor of Morphou, and Turkish Cypriot officials identified them as belonging to the Hadjiloizides collection from the list of stolen antiquities the Republic had sent to UNESCO; the case is set out in the Morphou mayor's shop. The Hadjiprodromou collection of Famagusta, about 2,000 items, was looted after 1974, and by 1983 only "40 or 50" had been recovered [7, p. 364]. Its pieces are still being recognised: a Cypro-Geometric ring-vase identified on a London gallery's website in July 2016 was matched to the collection, had been photographed in Turkey on its way to the European market, and had passed through Sotheby's in 1982 and 2014; it was repatriated in November 2016 [5].

The evidence against the system

Registration recorded possession, not lawful excavation. The card of 1973 proves that an object was in a declared collection in Cyprus at that date. It does not prove where or how the object was dug up. A later Director of Antiquities, Sophocles Hadjisavvas, said of the antiquities collected before 1974 that they were "illegal in the sense that they all came from illicit excavations", as Hardy quotes him [9, p. 462]. Lawful title and lawful export, which the record shows, are distinct from lawful excavation, which for most of these objects it cannot show. The Department's acceptance that the collections had "an historical status, however formed" [2, p. 423] is the same point stated from the other side.

The dealers' stock was fed in part by illicit digging. Megaw's own notice said that buying outside the licensed shops "is directly to encourage illegal excavation" [1], which assumes that unlicensed supply existed. The licensed shops drew on it too. Kolokasides bought "from various sources throughout the island" [3]. Palma bought from Skeparnides, from whom the Department confiscated 237 objects in 1937, and Merrillees notes that the place names given for such pieces are "not necessarily the archaeological findspot but the location of the seller or purchase" [2, p. 408]. Christakis Hadjiprodromou, according to Karageorghis, formed his collection between 1963 and 1974 "not from registered antiquities dealers but from the 'producers', that is, individuals who dug them up accidentally or illicitly" [2, p. 408]. Hardy's wider criticism of the 1963 to 1973 decade, and his figures, are set out on the silent-accord page.

The paper does not always lead back to the buyer. A licence could be issued in the dealer's name for a client's purchase, with objects described only by type, as the Kolokasides article shows of a licence for one "base ring juglet". Such a licence is genuine but hard to match to a particular pot.

The record answers these points in part. The licence system did what it was built to do: it put every sale through a named, inspected trader, it let the Museum keep objects it wanted and buy them, and it left a paper trail that the Department can still check. The registration of 1973 was published, not hidden, and it is the means by which the Republic has identified and claimed stolen pieces since 1974. Most of the registered collections are now public. What none of it can do is turn an illicitly dug object into a documented excavation.

What this means for an object on the market today

A Cypriot object with a licensed dealer's receipt, a numbered export licence, a C.M. lead seal or an old typed card naming a dealer such as Kolokasides left the island lawfully, and the Department of Antiquities in Nicosia can check a licence against its archive. Searching under the dealer's name, in all its spellings (Kolokasides, Kolokassides, Colocassides), is often necessary because the licence may not name the buyer.

An object that matches a 1973 registration card from a collection lost in the occupied north is stolen property, whatever its later paper, and the Department is the place to ask. An object from a registered collection in the south that was exported by permit after 1973 has a lawful export history. In every case the paper records title and export, not findspot. The documents that support a lawful history, and their limits, are set out in lawful and illicit in the record.