The Island Collections: Private Collections Formed on Cyprus and What Became of Them

Private collecting of antiquities was lawful on Cyprus from the Antiquities Law of 1935 until the law was tightened after independence, provided the owner declared what he held. Most of the large collections that exist on the island today were formed under that rule, some over a century and a half, some in the ten years of the "silent accord" between 1963 and 1973, when the Department of Antiquities let Cypriots buy objects dug in areas it could not police so that they would stay on the island. In December 1973 the Department finished registering them, with "a card with a description and photograph of every single item" [1, p. 233]. This page sets out what is known of each named collection: how it was formed, how it was registered, what the Turkish invasion of 1974 took from it, and where it is now. The policy itself is treated in collecting under the silent accord, the declaration register and the dealers in licensed dealers and registered collections, and the laws in legal export of Cypriot antiquities. How the collections passed to public foundations and museums after 1974 is set out in collections that became museums. The photograph at the head of the page is the Pierides house in Larnaca, built in 1825 and open as a museum since 1974 (Photo: A. Savin, Wikimedia Commons, Free Art Licence).

The collections at a glance

The table lists every named collection formed on the island for which there is a published account. "Registered" means declared to the Department of Antiquities and recorded by it; it says nothing about how the objects came out of the ground, which is discussed below. Sizes are those the sources give, and several are in conflict.

Three of these collections, in Karageorghis's own ranking, were the largest formed in the decade of the accord: "the Hadjiprodromou Collection (Famagusta), the Pierides Collection (Larnaca) and the Severis Collection (Nicosia)" [2, p. 17]. Two of the three, Pierides and Severis, are on public display today. The third was looted after the invasion.

Pierides, Larnaca: five generations

The Pierides collection is the oldest on the island and the best documented. It was begun in 1839 by Demetrios Pierides (1811 to 1895), a scholar who used it as reference material for his own publications [4, p. 13], and its first catalogue describes it as "the outcome of a systematic acquisition of Cypriote antiquities by five consecutive generations in the family" [5]. The family's own history of the collection is told in the article the Pierides family collection and is not repeated here.

What matters for this section is the collection's last years in private hands. The head of the family who took charge of it in 1967 bought, in the words of the 1985 catalogue, "in consultation with the Department of Antiquities ... a large number of antiquities, thus saving them for the country", collecting provenance information "whenever it was possible" [4, p. 14]. The same text says that the collections formed between 1963 and 1973 "were registered at the end of 1973 as being legally possessed", and that he also bought "on the foreign markets" pieces that "had been illicitly exported from Cyprus" [4, p. 14]. In June 1974 he gave the collection to the Pierides Foundation, which he had set up [4, p. 14]. It has been open to the public in the family house in Larnaca ever since, and the Pierides Museum is now run by the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation [10].

Its size is given three ways, and the figures should not be mixed. The inventory of June 1972 counted 2,236 objects [5]; current museum descriptions give "about 2,500" [11]; and Hardy, citing a study of 2008, gives "around 4000" for that year, of which "around 800" were added after June 1974 [6, p. 469]. On Hardy's arithmetic about 964 objects were added between June 1972 and June 1974 [6, p. 469]. The three counts come from different inventories made for different purposes, and none of them is the number of catalogued pieces, which is about 280 in the 1985 catalogue [6, p. 469].

Giabra Pierides, Nicosia: the other branch

The second Pierides collection descends from the same nineteenth-century collection, through the Giabra branch of the family. George and Nefeli Giabra Pierides kept it in Nicosia; their daughter and son-in-law gave it to the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation in 1999, and it opened as the Museum of the George and Nefeli Giabra Pierides Collection in 2002, with Karageorghis's catalogue [9, 10]. The museum holds more than 600 objects, and is strongest in Mycenaean and Cypriot pictorial pottery and limestone sculpture [9]. Admission is free [10]. Karageorghis counted it, with the Pierides collection at Larnaca, as one of "two major private collections in Cyprus" that "have now been given to two private museums" [3, p. 9]. How much it grew between 1963 and 1973 is not published, and its registration is not described in print.

Severis and Phylactou: the two loans of 2010

The Severis collection is the clearest case of a collection formed across the whole period. Its prologue, written by the collectors' son, says that his grandfather Demosthenis Severis, born at Kythrea and later living at Kyrenia, was offered antiquities by villagers "as he always showed himself to be a keen and serious buyer", and that his daughter-in-law, Leto Severis (1916 to 1997), began her own collection "by the early 40s" [2, p. 13]. After the Second World War, it says, "the laws governing the antiquities trade were looser than today and the acquisition of objects almost unrestricted, provided it was not for export" [2, p. 14]. She collected "for the next 28 years" and stopped in July 1974, when "part of the collection, about 600 pieces, was looted and disappeared for ever" [2, p. 14]. By then it had "over 2,500 pieces, all carefully numbered and inventoried", kept in a study gallery at the family house in Nicosia [2, p. 14]. Karageorghis wrote that it "was formed mainly during the decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s" and was declared with the others in 1973 [2, pp. 16–17]. At the end of 2009 the collection was placed on long-term loan with the Leventis Municipal Museum in Nicosia [2, p. 11]. The family's story is told in the Leto and Costakis Severis collection; the collection also has a page at /collections/severis.

The Phylactou collection is older and was not a product of the accord. Its present owner's grandfather, Heracles Skyrianides of Limassol, collected from about 1878, when he let the ground floor of his house to the first British Commissioner of Limassol, and "when he died in 1944, his considerable collection was divided amongst his three children"; the share that passed to the present owner's mother "proved to be the smallest part of the collection" [3, p. 13]. Part of it was later kept at a house the family built at Bellapais: "I consider those objects irretrievably lost, as one more 'casualty' of the 1974 Turkish invasion" [3, p. 13]. Karageorghis noted that the collection "was formed at a time when private collectors could collect antiquities, something that was allowed by the provisions of the Antiquities Law of 1935" [3, p. 9]. It went on long-term loan to the same museum, whose new Constantine Leventis Wing, with one gallery for each collection, opened in January 2010 [3, p. 9]. It has a page at /collections/phylactou.

Lyssarides, Hadjiprodromou, Hadjiloizides and the older Famagusta collections

The Lyssarides collection is known from a single sentence in Karageorghis's chronicle for 1984: "Une donation importante a été faite au Musée par le Dr. et Mme Lyssarides de Nicosie, qui ont offert une grande partie de leur collection privée, dûment enregistrée" [8, p. 898]. The donors were Vassos Lyssarides (1920 to 2021) and Barbara Cornwall Lyssarides (1932 to 2019), and the objects entered the Cyprus Museum that year; their inventory numbers show more than one batch [8, p. 898]. When and from whom the couple bought is not recorded. "Dûment enregistrée" (duly registered) is the Director's phrase, and it places the collection in the same register as the others.

The two great losses of 1974 were both in the occupied north. The Hadjiprodromou collection of Famagusta, with about 2,000 objects, was formed between 1963 and 1974 and looted after the invasion; in 1983 Karageorghis said that "only 40 or 50 of approximately 2,000 items have been recovered" [13], and in 2010 he wrote that "the remaining part of this collection is now kept in the Monastery of Saint Barnabas, near Salamis" [3, p. 9]. The Hadjiloizides collection of Morphou is known only from its marks, found on objects seized in the shop of the town's mayor in 1975 [14]; that case is set out in the Morphou mayor's shop. Neither story is retold here.

Famagusta also had older collections. In 1935 and 1936 "30 odd private collections of various sizes in Famagusta and Varosha" were declared under the new law, and the pharmacist George Basil Palma's "was by far and away the largest and most varied" [7, p. 409]. Palma was also a licensed dealer, and his export consignments were "regularly approved", with objects of exceptional quality kept back and "bought by or given to the Cyprus Museum" [7, p. 409]. After his death in 1952 his daughter "progressively sold" most of what remained to the Cyprus Museum, including about 78 pieces of gold jewellery in 1954 [7, p. 421]. At Trikomo the collection of Epaminondas Skeparnides "was registered with the Cyprus Museum in 1906 (No. 141)" and declared again in 1936; part of his later holding was confiscated in 1937 [7, p. 408]. These are the earliest registered collections on record, and both ended largely in the state's museum.

Zintilis: a collection formed largely abroad

The collection of Thanos N. Zintilis (1929 to 2019), born at Klirou, belongs here only by contrast. It was formed mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, by a Cypriot who lived abroad from his youth, and its catalogue records objects that he found himself, bought from farmers or received as gifts, and none from a regular excavation [12]. It was long kept at the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam and is now on long-term loan to the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, which published it in 2004 with about 780 entries [12]. It was not part of the island's register of 1973. It can be seen on the third floor of the Museum of Cycladic Art.

Karageorghis's catalogue prefaces as state endorsement

The Director of Antiquities who ran the accord also published its results. Karageorghis wrote the catalogues of the Pierides (1973, 1985), Severis (1999, 2010), Giabra Pierides (2002) and Phylactou (2010) collections, most of them with funding from the A. G. Leventis Foundation [3, p. 10]. In them he described the policy in his own name: "With the agreement of the Ministry of Communications and Works, the Department of Antiquities at that time decided to follow a policy of 'silent accord', allowing Cypriots who had access to the Turkish enclaves to buy the 'spoils' of looting so that these should remain in the country and not be exported abroad" [2, p. 16]. He set out what the collectors had done: "some private collectors in Cyprus, especially those who were active during the troubled period between 1963 and 1974, have made a positive contribution by preserving within the Island objects which otherwise would have found their way to the illicit market of antiquities abroad" [3, p. 9]. He added a caveat in the next sentence: "Not all collectors, however, were scrupulous, as we know" [3, p. 9]. And he gave the scholarly reason for publishing them: although "the value of antiquities for which there is no provenance is diminished", the objects "are usually intact and of good quality" [3, pp. 9–10].

The policy was not concealed. Karageorghis described it in print in Antiquity within months of the invasion, in a letter written to explain the London sales: the collections had been formed "with the silent accord of the Department of Antiquities, which considered this to be the best policy to follow in view of the anomalous political conditions prevailing in Cyprus", and "all these collections have been registered" [1, p. 233]. The Department itself accepted, as Merrillees put it, "that these collections had an historical status, however formed, and could be studied and published with impunity" [7, p. 423].

The evidence against: Hardy and the illicit digging

The case against reading these collections as a rescue is strongest for the decade of the accord, and it comes first from the Department's own side. The material was bought from looters, and the catalogues say so; the 1985 Pierides catalogue says it was decided to pursue a policy by which "Greek Cypriots were allowed to buy antiquities looted by Turkish Cypriots" [4, p. 14]. A later Director, Sophocles Hadjisavvas, wrote that the collected antiquities were "illegal in the sense that they all came from illicit excavations" (as quoted by Hardy) [6, p. 462]. The Hadjiprodromou collection was formed, according to Karageorghis as reported by Merrillees, "not from registered antiquities dealers but from the 'producers', that is, individuals who dug them up accidentally or illicitly" [7, p. 408]. Not every buyer kept what he bought on the island: the Severis catalogue names "foreign diplomats, members of foreign missions and others" among the buyers, men "who enjoyed immunity" [2, pp. 16–17].

Samuel Hardy's study of 2014 adds a second argument: that the official account, Turkish Cypriot looters in the enclaves and Greek Cypriot buyers, does not fit the catalogues. For the Severis collection he counts 288 catalogued objects, of which 211 have no find-spot and 77 have one. Of the 77, 31 are from Alaas and 4 from Marion, which he assigns to Greek Cypriot diggers, and 20 from Galinoporni, 13 from Marki and 9 from Souskiou, which he assigns to Turkish Cypriots: "So, 42 (54.55 %) were probably looted by Turkish Cypriots, 35 (45.45 %) by Greek Cypriots" [6, p. 470]. He calls his approach a "crude categorical method" [6, p. 459].

The figures need their denominators. The 35 are 35 of 77 objects with a find-spot, and about 12% of the 288 catalogued; the catalogue is itself about a ninth of a collection of more than 2,500. Hardy assigns each find-spot to the community of the nearest village, which is his inference, not a statement in his sources. And 31 of the 35 come from one cemetery, Alaas near Gastria, which was looted in 1973; Hardy himself quotes Karageorghis that collectors "bought" from the looters and then "help[ed]" the Department to find the site, which it excavated [6, p. 472]. Who dug Alaas is not stated in any source he quotes. The find-spot in a catalogue, Merrillees adds, is often "not necessarily the archaeological findspot but the location of the seller or purchase" [7, p. 408].

The digging was not lawful, and "registered" never meant "lawfully excavated". The record answers the objection on a different point: the collections did what the policy said they would do. They were declared and recorded object by object; they stayed on the island; the Department published them; and, with the exceptions forced by the invasion, they are now in public hands or on public loan. Of the three largest, Pierides has been a public museum since 1974 and Severis since 2010. The third, Hadjiprodromou, was dispersed after the Turkish invasion, and the Department could claim its pieces because, as Karageorghis wrote in 1975, it held complete records of the antiquities left in the occupied part of the island [1, p. 234].

What this means for an object on the market today

An object from one of these collections can usually be traced. The Pierides, Giabra Pierides, Severis, Phylactou and Lyssarides holdings are catalogued or inventoried, and the 1973 cards record every declared object; an object that matches one and is not accounted for in a museum is a matter for the Department of Antiquities. Objects from the Hadjiprodromou and Hadjiloizides collections carry the Republic's claim, and several Hadjiprodromou pieces have been returned since 2015. A label or a family story that names an island collection is therefore a claim that can be checked against a published catalogue or the Department's register, and it should be. An object said to come from a Cypriot collection formed before 1974 left the island lawfully only if it was exported under licence; a registered collection could be owned on Cyprus, but it was not an export permit. The wider question of how the market reads an undocumented Cypriot object is treated in the 1974 presumption and collecting Cypriot antiquities today.