Church Art and Antiquities: Two Trades from the Occupied North

Two kinds of object left the occupied north of Cyprus after the Turkish invasion of 1974, and they are usually counted together. One was church art: icons, wall paintings and mosaics taken from Orthodox, Maronite and Armenian churches whose congregations had been forced to leave. The other was archaeology: ancient pottery, figurines and sculpture from private collections, museums and tombs. The apse mosaic of the Panagia Kanakaria at Lythrankomi, shown above as it was photographed in place in 1973 (photo: Shirazibustan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons), belongs to the first group. It was prised from the wall between 1976, when the last priest left the church, and 1979, when the theft was reported to the Republic, and in 1988 four of its fragments were sold to a dealer in Indianapolis for $1,080,000 [1]. Nothing in the archaeological trade from the north comes near that figure, that degree of documentation or that kind of buyer. This entry sets out what church art is, why its trade differs from the trade in antiquities, what the record of archaeological loss in the north actually contains, how the headline numbers came to merge the two, and where the two trades did meet. The short form of the argument is that they were different objects and markets, partly the same network.

What church art is

Church art, in this section, means the furnishings and decoration of Christian churches: panel icons, the painted wooden screens (iconostases) that carry them, wall paintings, wall and floor mosaics, and liturgical objects such as chalices, crosses, censers, Gospel covers and embroidered vestments. Almost all of it is medieval or later. The Kanakaria mosaic is one of the few early pieces, from the sixth century; the Lysi frescoes are thirteenth-century.

These objects are not archaeological finds. They were not buried and dug up; they hung on the walls and stood on the altars of buildings in use until 1974, and in some villages of the Karpas until 1976. They belonged to a living institution, the Church of Cyprus (or the Maronite and Armenian churches), which kept inventories, photographed its buildings and could name its losses. In the market they belong to a different trade, that of icons and Byzantine art, with its own dealers and buyers, while ancient Cypriot pottery is sold beside Greek vases and Egyptian amulets.

For the archaeology of the same region, and the lawful history of most of it, see looting in occupied northern Cyprus and the legal export of Cypriot antiquities.

Why church art was a different trade

Four things separate the church trade from the trade in excavated objects: uniqueness, documentation, value and the number of buyers.

The first is uniqueness. A fresco cut from the dome of a named chapel is one object with one owner. A Red Polished bowl from a Bronze Age cemetery is one of thousands of the same type, and nothing in its fabric says whether it left a tomb at Lapithos in 1913, in 1931 or in 1977. Most icons are also single works, and the large wall paintings and mosaics are fragments of a known whole: the Kanakaria apostle medallions were parts of one apse, and each fragment that surfaced could be matched to the photographs of it in place.

The second is documentation. The churches had been photographed and published before the thefts. When the Menil Foundation in Houston sought the owner of the Lysi frescoes, Turkey, Lebanon and Cyprus all claimed them, "but only Cyprus provided documentary evidence of the location" of the church [2]. That kind of record is what the Church relied on when it went to court abroad. For tomb material there is usually no such record, because an illicitly dug tomb is undocumented by definition; the only archaeological objects from the north that could be claimed in the same way were those in registered collections, which carried numbers.

The third is value. The prices in the church trade were of a different order. Four Kanakaria fragments sold for $1,080,000 in 1988 [1]. The Menil Foundation's purchase price for the Lysi frescoes "was near $520,000", paid with the agreement of the Department of Antiquities and the Church of Cyprus, who then let the Foundation conserve and display them in Houston for fifteen years [2]. The church art recovered in Munich in 1997, "some 30 frescoes" from the monastery of Antiphonitis, dozens of icons and a Kanakaria apostle, was reported to be "worth $40 million" [3]. Against this, in the archaeological trade of the north, eighteen ancient pieces were sold to a German buyer in 1982 for DM 1,000 in all [6]. In our own unpublished research on 2,168 Cypriot vessels sold at auction since 2015, the median price is about $820; about 3 per cent of sold lots reached $10,000 and fewer than 1 per cent reached $50,000.

The fourth is the number of buyers. The church trade had few and needed few: a Houston foundation, an Indianapolis dealer, a handful of collectors and institutions in the Netherlands, Germany and Japan. A trade with so few buyers can be organised from the top, with orders placed for named objects. A Bronze Age pot worth a few hundred dollars needs the opposite: many small buyers, a dealer or a tourist willing to carry a few pieces out. That is the pattern the archaeological seizures in the north show.

The documented archaeological losses in the north

The record of ancient objects taken from the occupied north after 1974 is real, but it is short. It is listed in full here, because it is often assumed to be much longer.

The Hadjiprodromou case is the best documented, because the collection was registered by the Department of Antiquities in 1973 and its pieces carried numbers. Its owner could claim them when they appeared in auction catalogues, and the A. G. Leventis Foundation bought back the objects restored to him and gave them to the Cyprus Museum; a cruciform picrolite figurine, ex-Hadjiprodromou no. 889, is now Cyprus Museum 1981/V-4/9 [5, p. 54]. The same catalogue adds a detail that complicates the story. The picrolite figurines and pendants in the collection were believed to have come from tombs in the Chalcolithic cemetery of Souskiou-Vathyrkakas near Palaepaphos, in the south, which "before 1974 ... suffered at the hands of looters" [5, p. 58]. The clearest archaeological loss from the occupied north was, in its origin, the product of illicit digging in the south before the invasion (see Neolithic and picrolite figurines). The Foundation reported in its third decade that "more items have since come to light, purchased from dealers by the Foundation" [9, p. 29].

The Hadjiloizides objects are a different case and should not be merged with Hadjiprodromou. They were seized inside the north by Turkish Cypriot officials, who identified the "OHL" marks from the list of stolen antiquities the Department of Antiquities had sent to UNESCO [6]. The account of these seizures comes from the Turkish Cypriot weekly Olay, whose 1982 series "Perishing Cyprus" described the trade from inside the north and named the dealer-mayor, the buyers and the officials [6]. Its picture is of small batches, cheap sales and local dealing.

Two expert statements stand beside these cases. Sophocles Hadjisavvas of the Department of Antiquities wrote in 2015 that "looting continues to flourish" in the occupied areas and that he had personally observed the looting at Agia Irini [4, p. 132]. Marc Fehlmann, writing from the Eastern Mediterranean University in occupied Famagusta and openly hostile to the Republic's figures, still states that "apparently well-informed gangs regularly plunder archaeological remains in the North of the island", that they find sites unknown to the Department, and that they "are rarely caught" [10, pp. 161–162]. Neither names a site other than Agia Irini or gives a date.

Several places often named as looted after 1974 do not appear in this record. No published case of post-1974 looting has been reported for the Bronze Age cemeteries of Bellapais-Vounous or Lapithos, for the sites of the Karpas peninsula, or for the necropolis of Salamis. Hadjisavvas describes Enkomi and Salamis as neglected and "left at the mercy of the elements" [4, p. 131], which is a different charge. The unprovenanced Vounous and Lapithos pottery in museums and on the market is attributed in the literature to digging under Ottoman and British rule, and much of it left the island through lawful channels long before 1974. An absence of reports is not proof that nothing was dug, and the next section of this entry shows how thin reporting from the north has been. It does mean that the large figures cannot be filled with named cases.

How the headline figures merge the two

The figure most often quoted for losses from the north is 60,000. Its earliest printed form is a paper by Sophocles Hadjisavvas at the Cambridge symposium on illicit antiquities in 1999, published in 2001. The A. G. Leventis Foundation quotes the passage: "Since then it is estimated that more than 60,000 ancient artefacts have been illegally transferred to different countries of the world, together with perhaps another 16,000 icons and mosaics stolen from churches" [9, p. 29]. In this first wording the two trades are counted separately: 60,000 ancient artefacts, and 16,000 church objects on top. The figure is an estimate by the Cyprus Police, and no method for it has been published.

The wording then drifted. In 2015 Hadjisavvas himself, citing his own 2001 paper, wrote: "Some 60,000 ancient and medieval artifacts were exported and sold on the international black market" [4, p. 130]. "Ancient artefacts" had become "ancient and medieval artifacts", which folds the church objects into the one number. Fehlmann, attacking the figure, moved it the other way, to "60,000 classical and pre-classical artefacts that, according to the Greek Cypriot authorities, left Northern Cyprus illegally after 1974" [10, p. 161]. Both later readings place the whole number in the north. The original speaks of objects "illegally transferred" from Cyprus, and describes "most of the un-provenanced antiquities offered" as "probably from illegal excavations" [9, p. 29], without saying where on the island they were dug.

The second phrase that merges the two trades is the account of the Council of Europe rapporteur Ymenus van der Werff in 1989: "After early opportunist raids during the unsettled period following 1974, more organised looting of selected targets seems to have taken place between 1977 and 1982" [4, p. 131]. It is often quoted as a description of looting in general. In his report it stands under the heading "Damage to immovable cultural property", that is, buildings and their fixed decoration, and its one example is the Kanakaria mosaic, whose removal "was certainly an acrobatic feat" [4, p. 132]. "Organised looting of selected targets" describes church buildings. For tombs, the only evidence of activity in the same years is the run of Olay seizures of 1980 to 1982, which point to small-scale selling rather than organisation.

Press reports carry the merger further. On 22 July 2024, at the ceremony in Nicosia for the last return from Munich, a Reuters report described the recoveries as ranging "from church doors traced to Japan, bronze age antiquities in Australia" to early Christian art in the United States, all "taken from northern Cyprus" [11]. The Australian objects were 36 antiquities from the Chalcolithic to the Roman period, returned in May 2023; the Cyprus Mail's report of that return gives them no northern origin and does not mention 1974 [12]. The same Reuters report notes that "hundreds of churches and archaeological sites have been plundered" [11], in an article whose objects and news peg were church art. When the 2024 Munich return was announced, the only figure printed for losses was "over 16,000 Christian icons, mosaics and murals", given by Michalis Gavrielidis, head of the police office for combating the illegal possession of and trafficking in antiquities [7]. No count of archaeological objects was given, and readers had only the church figure for the whole.

The effect of these shifts is to make the losses of the churches, which were large, systematic and well documented, stand for the archaeology of the north, whose documented losses are the short list above. A Bronze Age pot on the market then appears to belong to a trade that was mostly in icons and frescoes.

Where the two trades overlap: the same network

The two trades were not separate in every respect, and the overlap is the strongest evidence against treating them as unrelated.

The same people and the same routes handled both. On 16 March 1981 three chests sent from Tymbou airport to a German address were opened at Ankara and found to hold 158 "antiques", including icons sawn into pieces; Olay described the find as proof "beyond doubt" of "the icon robbery and antique smuggling which has been going on for years" [6]. Olay used "antiques" for icons as well, and the objects it identifies in the chests are icons, so the case shows a shared route rather than a proven mixed consignment. The mayor of Morphou who held the Hadjiloizides antiquities was a licensed dealer, and Olay names him as the seller of the 1982 batch [6].

The Munich dealer whose stock was at the centre of the church cases also held antiquities. Aydın Dikmen was never convicted of an offence concerning Cypriot antiquities; the objects in his stock came back through civil proceedings in Germany and a final agreement signed in Munich in June 2024. That agreement covered "24 ecclesiastical relics and 36 prehistoric and other antiquities", the latter described as taken from "occupied archaeological sites and private collections" [7]. Thirty-six of the 60 objects in the last return were therefore not church art, and Reuters described the batch as "including items from the chalcolithic and bronze age" [11]. The sites they came from have not been named in any public source. At the ceremony, Bishop Christophoros of Karpasia said that Dikmen's heirs "unfortunately still possess, and traffic stolen cultural goods from Cyprus" [13]; that is the Bishop's statement, and no heir has been named.

Archaeological looting in the north is also asserted from both sides, and is not only a Greek Cypriot claim. Olay was a Turkish Cypriot paper; Fehlmann, who rejects the 60,000 figure, accepts that gangs plunder northern sites [10, pp. 161–162]. The few reported cases may reflect weak policing and reporting in the occupied areas more than little digging. Samuel Hardy's work on the period before 1974 adds that the enclaves under Turkish Cypriot control in 1963 to 1974 were looted and their finds bought by Greek Cypriot collectors, so that undocumented northern types in lawful collections in the south may themselves be loot of the 1960s [14]. And the Church's recoveries were partly purchases: the Lysi frescoes were bought, with the Church's consent, and Hardy has examined the cost of such buy-backs in the Cypriot cases [2; 15].

None of this joins the two trades into one. The overlap is in the network at the top, in the 1970s and early 1980s, and in stock such as Dikmen's in Munich, which held both. The objects, their documentation, their prices and their buyers stayed different.

The two trades compared

What this means for a Bronze Age pot on the market today

A Bronze Age Cypriot pot offered for sale today is an object of the archaeological trade, and the evidence for that trade in the occupied north after 1974 is the list given above: two registered collections, one London sale, a few small seizures, one museum report, one necropolis, one statue and 36 objects in a dealer's stock. The figures that make northern looting look vast were built mostly from church art, or have been read as if they were.

Where a pot comes from a registered collection that was lost in 1974, its number identifies it, and the Department of Antiquities has a record to claim it; the Hadjiprodromou objects returned in that way. Where it is a common type, such as a Red Polished bowl of a kind found at Vounous and Lapithos, its type alone says nothing about when it left Cyprus, and the export record shows that very many such pots left lawfully through the partage, the Cyprus Museum's saleroom and licensed export (see how the Cyprus Museum sold antiquities and Cypriot export licences and labels). What decides its status is its own history: a sale catalogue, an export licence, a collection label or an old photograph dated before the date-lines that buyers and museums now apply (see UNESCO 1970 and the ethics of modern collections and provenance versus provenience). Without such a record the pot is undocumented, and the market treats it accordingly; the church-art figures do not bear on that question. For what an owner can do with such an object, see collecting Cypriot antiquities today.