Does Looting Cyprus Pay? The Economics of Illicit Cypriot Antiquities

On 2 November 1953 the licensed Nicosia dealer P. Kolokasides wrote out a receipt on his letterhead to a visitor, Walter G. Beasley, for a group of ancient pots and lamps, each with its stock number, for a total of £23. The receipt later received an Australian customs stamp; it is one of the documents discussed in the article on export licences and labels. It shows two things that run through this entry. Ordinary Cypriot antiquities have always been cheap, and a great many of them left the island lawfully, with paper. Those two facts govern what a looted object can fetch now. This entry sets out what Cypriot antiquities sell for, why the lawful supply is so large, how the market discounts material without a history, who receives the money when an object is looted, why police valuations should not be read as prices, and how looting on the island has followed poverty rather than price. A separate section sets out where the argument stops: the objects and circumstances in which looting can still pay.

What Cypriot antiquities sell for

The figures in this section come from our own unpublished research: a compilation of public auction results for Cypriot antiquities, with prices converted to US dollars at fixed rates and given in nominal terms, buyer's premium included where the saleroom reports it.

The median sold Cypriot vessel made about $820, in a sample of 2,168 sold lots. The middle half of those prices lies between about $350 and $1,900. The trend is downward. The yearly median for a sold vessel was about $960 in 2019 and between $285 and $420 in each year from 2024 to 2026. Part of that fall reflects a change in where Cypriot antiquities are sold rather than a fall in what any one object is worth: online sales have grown, and they are cheap. Of the recent sold lots in our sample (2023 to 2026, coins excluded), about 91% went through low-cost venues, with a median of about $400, against a median of about $3,780 at the major auction houses. Many of the online salerooms sell only 40 to 50% of the Cypriot lots they offer; the rest go unsold.

Prices by class, from the same research:

The order of magnitude is not in dispute. Marc Fehlmann, writing from Eastern Mediterranean University in occupied Famagusta in an openly polemical chapter on the Cypriot heritage, gave the same picture from the major houses in 2014: common Red Polished pottery "rarely costs more than a couple of hundred pounds sterling a piece", Early Iron Age Bichrome "usually remains below £1,000", and Archaic or Classical terracotta or limestone sculptures "rarely make over £10,000" [1]. The class table shows the same ranking. A pot is worth hundreds of dollars, a figure or a head is worth thousands, and the jump to five figures needs sculpture, a rare form or a long documented history. For the factors that move a single object's price, see what is my Cypriot antiquity worth and how much antiquities cost.

Why the supply is so large

Cypriot antiquities are cheap above all because there are so many of them outside Cyprus, and most left lawfully. For about 120 years, from the Ottoman firmans to the 1996 amendment that ended licensed export, there was always a lawful channel: partage under the Ottoman regulation of 1874, permits under the colonial laws of 1905 and 1935, the Cyprus Museum's own sales, and licensed dealers such as Kolokasides. The history is set out in the legal export of Cypriot antiquities and the article on how the Cyprus Museum sold antiquities.

The scale is easiest to see in a single collection. Of the 35,000 objects that Luigi Palma di Cesnola removed from Cyprus, about 6,000 remain in the Metropolitan Museum. The Ringling Museum in Sarasota bought 2,300 at the Museum's sales of 1928, "a large number" had earlier gone to Stanford University, and others were sold over the counter at the Museum, mostly to private buyers [2, p. 23]. Those objects have been changing hands for a century, with Cesnola's name attached. Add the dispersal of Hamilton Lang's and other nineteenth-century collections, the Swedish Cyprus Expedition's share, the saleroom and the licensed export of private collections down to 1996, and the stock of ordinary Cypriot pottery abroad, much of it documented, runs to tens of thousands of pieces.

Fehlmann's study of the two largest auction houses points the same way. Of 52,482 antiquities offered by Christie's and Sotheby's between 1988 and 2008, 1,842 (4%) were Cypriot; 377 of those had a recorded history before 1970, and 15 could be traced to Cesnola [1]. He used the price level as an argument against the official estimate of 60,000 objects lost from the occupied north: if that many had passed through the international market since 1974, "this volume would have caused the collapse of prices for Cypriot antiquities" [1]. The argument is his, and its estimate of "a few thousand" in place of 60,000 is his own inference; the point about supply and price stands without it. A buyer who wants a Base Ring juglet, a White Painted jug or a snowman figure never needs a fresh one. A looted pot competes with a large lawful stock that already has paperwork.

The discount on undocumented material and where it ends up

The market discounts objects that have no history. Our own unpublished research cannot measure this directly, because most online lots carry no provenance at all, but the venue split is a fair proxy. Why undocumented pieces and fakes collect at online venues is set out in the internet era. The same class sells for three to six times as much at the major houses as at the large online salerooms, and the major houses require a checkable history. That requirement is less strict than a rule against anything recorded after 1970. Christie's has sold Cypriot sculpture whose history begins after 1970: a Late Archaic limestone votary at Christie's New York, sale 18807, lot 320, 28 October 2019, with a history starting at a Zurich gallery and a purchase in 1977 (sold for $10,000, below its low estimate), and a limestone head of Herakles at Christie's London, sale 23881, lot 22, 2025, whose recorded history begins at a provincial French auction in 1989. What these pieces have, and what a fresh find lacks, is a written trail that a buyer, a researcher or the Republic can check.

Material without a history therefore goes to the bottom of the market, and that is where it is now being found. In 2025 and 2026 the Department of Antiquities, whose officers monitor online sales, had a series of Cypriot lots withdrawn from small regional and online salerooms in Britain and the United States. At Sloans & Kenyon the withdrawal covered 18 objects: two Early Bronze Age vessels, eleven Middle Bronze Age vessels, four Cypro-Archaic vessels and a fourth-century BC limestone head, handed to the Cypriot embassy in Washington on 23 February 2026 [3]. At Halls Fine Art the Department identified a Late Cypriot juglet on 6 April 2026; the saleroom withdrew it and the holder returned it [4]. In each case the objects were ordinary pots or a single head, of the kind that sells for a few hundred dollars, and they were returned voluntarily by the consignors. No trafficker is named in any of these cases. They show where an undocumented Cypriot object ends up and what it is worth there.

Who gets the money

The money records, where they survive, show the digger receiving the smallest share at every period.

In the nineteenth century the digger's wage is on record. In 1868, after locusts had destroyed the crops at Dali (Idalion), the villagers "repaired in great numbers to the pottery-diggings". Lang wrote that "five young men who were working in the hope of gaining a shilling or two a day stumbled upon a treasure which brought them about 800 pounds" [5, p. 128]. Lang told the story as an exception; a shilling or two a day was what the men worked for. Lang also records that the villagers soon knew enough to charge collectors high prices, and that two local middlemen organised them, one working for Cesnola and one for Lang himself [5, p. 128]. The digging was an open village trade with consuls as buyers, under the rules described in the legal export entry.

In the occupied north after the Turkish invasion, the Turkish Cypriot newspaper Olay published a series on the smuggling of antiquities in April and May 1982, translated into English in the record of a United States congressional commission hearing in 1985. It reports that on 1 January 1982, 18 antiquities were confiscated from a German buyer as he tried to take them out, and that the mayor of Morphou, who held a dealer's licence, had sold them to him for DM 1,000 [6]. That is about DM 56 a piece, or roughly $23 at the exchange rate of the time (our conversion). It was a dealer's retail price to a tourist; whoever dug the pieces received less.

The best-documented money chain in the Cypriot record concerns church art, which was a different market from archaeology, with unique objects at six- and seven-figure prices. It still shows how the money divides. The apse mosaic of the Panagia Kanakaria was prised off the wall after the village congregation left in 1976 and before the loss was reported in 1979 (see looting in occupied northern Cyprus). In 1988 an Indianapolis dealer paid $1.08 million for four fragments in the free port of Geneva airport. According to the district court's findings in the Indiana litigation, Aydın Dikmen, the Munich-based holder, received $350,000; of the intermediaries who arranged the sale, Michel van Rijn received $282,500, a second dealer $297,500 and a third $80,000, and a London lawyer $70,000. The second dealer then sold half his share in any resale profit to an investor for a further $375,000 [13]. The buyer then asked about $20 million for the mosaics [7]. Dikmen's share was about a third of the Geneva price and under 2% of the asking price. Dikmen was never convicted of anything; the removal itself is not in the money record, and whoever cut the mosaics from the wall does not appear in it.

The same pattern appears outside Cyprus. Neil Brodie's study of five documented cases from outside Cyprus found that "in all cases over 98 per cent of the final price was destined to end up in the pockets of the middlemen", and that "the original finder received very little" [8]. One of the finders of the Elmalı hoard in Turkey "received only $80 and a year in jail", while the buyers paid roughly $3 million [8]. The Cypriot figures fit that pattern. Applied to an ordinary pot that makes $250 to $800 at an online sale, a finder's share of a few per cent is a few dollars to a few tens of dollars; that is an inference from the published cases, not a measured price.

Police valuations are not prices

The figure most often quoted for a southern looting case is a police valuation. In January 2010 the police broke up a group in Limassol: the Cyprus Mail reported nine people arrested and remanded, four more Cypriots and a Syrian sought, and "antiquities worth about €11 million". "Over 100 artefacts, including statuettes and urns" had been found, together with coins and seals, and the suspects held "catalogues listing a large variety of antiquities along with their estimated market value" [9]. The international press gave the value as $15.5 million, the same figure converted to dollars. The case is set out with the other southern cases in organised cases in the south.

Divided by a little over 100 objects, €11 million is about €100,000 an object, or roughly a hundred times the median auction price of a Cypriot antiquity in our own unpublished research. Fehlmann's response was blunt: "This valuation is obviously nonsense", and "If Cypriot police forces are successful, their chief constables always exaggerate the market value of the items seized"; €11 million of Cypriot antiquities, he wrote, "would constitute several truckloads of sculptures, pottery and other objects" [1]. His tone is his own, and the case was a real one: the police described an organised group with excavation tools and price catalogues, the one well-documented ring of that size in the south. The Director of Antiquities at the time, Maria Hadjicostis, gave the measure from her side. She called the Bronze Age pieces "significant artefacts", and she added that "rare antiquities are not included" [9]. A police valuation records what the police thought the haul was worth. It is not a price that anyone paid, and it should be attributed to the police whenever it is quoted.

Looting followed poverty, not prices

On the island itself, the record of digging follows hardship rather than the saleroom. The Dali rush of 1868 began when the locusts took the harvest [5, p. 128]. Under the Department of Antiquities, the Director's report for 1955 (A. H. S. Megaw's) recorded that, "due to full employment and increased security, there was nearly no illicit digging", as Samuel Hardy summarises it [10]. Eight years later the island was in civil war. From 1963 to 1974, Hardy writes, citing reports by Kenneth Hopkirk of 1971 and 1972, "systematic looting" broke out; the looters were "most… extremely poor" and riddled landscapes with robber trenches [10].

That period is the strongest evidence that looting can pay on the island, and Hardy states it plainly. A later Director, Sophocles Hadjisavvas, wrote in 2001 that the antiquities collected in those years all came from illicit excavations, that "at least one collector had organised teams of illicit diggers", and that "more than 1250 people had become collectors" (Hardy's rendering of Hadjisavvas, 2001, p. 135) [10]. Hardy argues that the government's "silent accord", which allowed Greek Cypriots with access to the enclaves to buy, "did not simply protect a revenue stream for looters, dealers and collectors that incentivised the pillage" [10]. The policy was not secret: Vassos Karageorghis described it in a letter printed in Antiquity in 1976, and the collections were registered in a declaration window under the 1935 law in 1973 rather than under an amnesty statute. Hardy's evidence still shows a period in which civil war, poverty and a domestic market of collectors made digging worth a poor man's while. After 1974 the recorded cases in the south are small and local, most of them single men with metal detectors near known sites. For the private collections of those years and where they went, see private collecting of Cypriot antiquities.

The limits of the argument

The economic case covers the ordinary bulk of Cypriot archaeology. It does not cover everything, and the evidence against it is as follows.

A top end exists, though it is thin: in our own unpublished research about 3% of sold Cypriot lots reach $10,000 and under 1% reach $50,000. But single objects make large sums. A Chalcolithic picrolite figure sold for €448,250 at Christie's Paris, sale 5080, lot 509, in 2003, against an estimate of €100,000 to €150,000 (see Neolithic and picrolite figurines). Archaic and Classical limestone heads have made between about $100,000 and $200,000: £103,250 at Christie's London, sale 4925, lot 258, 2012; £158,500 at Christie's London, sale 10373, lot 65, 2015; $150,000 at Christie's New York, sale 14355, lot 232, 2017; and $107,100 at Christie's New York, sale 21709, lot 53, 2023. A gold stater of Pnytagoras of Salamis made $90,000 against a $30,000 estimate at Classical Numismatic Group, Feature Auction 130, lot 206. A Late Bronze Age copper oxhide ingot of 27.4 kg sold for $170,000 hammer, $208,250 with premium, at Classical Numismatic Group, Feature Auction 126, lot 299, on 28 May 2024 (see the ingot sale and weights and ingots). Most of the five-figure sculpture carries an old history (the 2012 head was acquired in Paris around 1870, the 2017 head is ex Cesnola and the Metropolitan Museum, and the 2023 head was sold at Sotheby's London in 1964), so these prices reward documentation as much as rarity. The ingot is the exception: its recorded history begins in Munich in 1986.

Coins and metal-detected finds still pay. Staters have a median of about $950 in our own unpublished research and often sell above estimate. Coins are small, numerous, rarely published with a findspot and hard to trace. In the Republic the typical modern offender is a man with a metal detector near a known site, and seizures are dominated by coins.

The major houses also accept some post-1970 material. As set out above, Christie's has sold Cypriot pieces first recorded in 1977 and 1989. A history of some kind is required, and a history can be manufactured: an old-collection label or a minor sale in the 1980s can move an object up the market.

Diggers compare their earnings with local wages, and the saleroom median is not the digger's reference point. A shilling a day was worth digging for in 1868, and a small sum for a night's work may still be worth it to someone poor or to a hobbyist with a detector. The economic argument shows that looting is unattractive to organised crime and to the major market; it does not show that nobody digs.

Local collectors buy outside the auction market. In November 2016, during Operation Pandora, a search of a house in Pissouri uncovered 1,145 clay pots; across the island the police carried out 44 searches and seized 1,383 artefacts and 13 metal detectors [11]. Domestic demand of that kind never appears in auction results, and it can make digging worthwhile at prices the international market would not pay.

Low prices are partly the effect of enforcement. Monitoring by the Department of Antiquities and import rules in the United States and the European Union lower the price of undocumented material. That supports the view that looting barely pays now, but the low price is partly a result of enforcement. It is no proof that there was never a problem.

Buy-backs paid intermediaries. The state and its partners have been buyers. In 1992 Karageorghis wrote that the A. G. Leventis Foundation had, since 1974, bought Cypriot antiquities "which cannot be acquired except by purchase from antiquities dealers", that there were "instances of blackmail", and that pieces from the Hadjiprodromou collection, lost in occupied Famagusta, "were bought by the State from 'intermediaries' in order to save them" [12]. He gave one price: "over £8,000" for a sixth-century BC jug decorated with fish and a large Red Polished spoon bought from a London shop and given to the Cyprus Museum [12]. In the same piece he wrote that London dealers had access to "centres of production", above all the occupied north [12]. Each such purchase paid an intermediary for an object that had left a collection or a site without permission.

What the evidence means for an object on the market today

An ordinary Cypriot pot sells for a few hundred dollars, usually at an online sale and often under estimate. A large stock of lawfully exported and documented pieces, built up over 150 years, already meets demand for the common classes. The major salerooms require a checkable history, which a fresh find lacks, and undocumented pieces that reach small regional houses are now identified and withdrawn. In every case where the division of money is recorded, the finder kept a very small share. For most of what lies in Cypriot tombs, looting today returns little to the person who digs.

The argument does not extend to coins, gold, picrolite and fine limestone sculpture, where one find can be worth thousands; to a digger who measures a night's work against a poor wage; to buyers on the island who never use an auction; to the years 1963 to 1974, when civil war, poverty and domestic collecting made digging pay; or to the church art of the occupied north. Police valuations of seized material are not market prices. For a collector, the practical consequence is the one the market already applies: an ordinary Cypriot antiquity with a documented history is worth more, and is easier to sell, than one without. See collecting Cypriot antiquities today and provenance and provenience.