Buying Back: Recovering Cypriot Antiquities and Church Art by Purchase Instead of in Court

In its yearly report for 1970, the Department of Antiquities recorded that two Early Bronze Age cemeteries, at Kotchati and Marki, and a Late Bronze Age sanctuary near Psilatos had been plundered in areas it could not reach, and added a sentence that became a policy for half a century: "Le Service des Antiquités, dans l'impossibilité d'agir différemment, a essayé de récupérer quelques objets en les achetant indirectement", unable to act otherwise, it had tried to recover some objects by buying them indirectly [1]. From then until the 2020s, objects taken from Cyprus came back by two routes. Some were claimed: the owner proved title in a foreign court, or a foreign government handed them over. Others were bought: by the Department, by the A. G. Leventis Foundation on its behalf, and, for church art, by the Church of Cyprus and its supporters. This entry is about the choice between the two routes: the reasons the buyers gave, what each route achieved and what it cost, the strongest criticism of buying, by Samuel Hardy, and the reply from the record. The item-by-item record of purchases is not repeated here; it is in the purchases register and the state as buyer.

Why the buyers chose to buy

The buyers explained the policy in print, more than once. The clearest statement is Vassos Karageorghis's, written soon after he retired as Director of Antiquities, in the first volume of the International Journal of Cultural Property in 1992. In London, he wrote, "apart from cases where it is possible to prove that an object put up for sale is stolen, that it belongs to a museum or private collection (and in this case the lawful owner can claim it under the law), all other transactions are permitted" [3, p. 1]. Britain had not then joined the 1970 UNESCO Convention, so an object that had left Cyprus without a licence could be sold there lawfully unless an owner could identify it. Karageorghis's next sentence gave the consequence: "It is for this reason that the Leventis Foundation, based in London, from the Turkish invasion in 1974 to the present day, buys Cypriot antiquities which cannot be acquired except by purchase from antiquities dealers" [3, p. 2].

The Foundation's own report of 1990 set the limit of the policy. The Foundation "made sums promptly available to buy such objects at auction or directly from dealers and donated them to the Cyprus Museum. In this way an important collection of antiquities has been repatriated", and: "Only items which could not be identified as belonging to a specific museum or collection have been purchased abroad; in the case of objects with a known provenance, the Cyprus Government has always collaborated with Interpol and other official channels to obtain their return" [2, p. 11].

The two routes were therefore meant to divide the objects between them. An object with a museum number, a registered-collection card or a published photograph could be claimed. An object dug from a tomb and never recorded could not: nobody could prove in a London court whose it was, and the law of the market country did not forbid its sale. For that second class, which is most of the archaeological material, the choice was to buy it or to let it go to another buyer. "Repatriated" is the buyers' word for the result, and this entry keeps it as theirs.

The archaeological purchases in outline

The buying for the Cyprus Museum was small in number and steady. The Foundation's 1990 catalogue lists 44 objects in 30 entries bought between 1978 and 1989; of the purchases from dealers, all but one were made "on the London market" and one on the Swiss market, and no dealer is named [2, pp. 53–80]. The first, a Late Bronze Age bronze wheeled stand traced to a dealer near Frankfurt, was bought in 1978 "with a grant from the Cyprus Government and Mr A. G. Leventis" after the British Museum and the Louvre had declined it and told the Department where it was [2, p. 67]. The only price published for any of these purchases is Karageorghis's: for a sixth-century fish jug and a Red Polished terracotta spoon from a London shop, about 1991, "the Foundation paid a sum of over £8,000" [3, p. 2]. The Foundation's report for 1999 to 2008 adds further "repatriated" pieces, among them a terracotta deer, "purchased from dealers by the Foundation" [4, pp. 28–29].

One purchase broke the pattern. The Hadjiprodromou collection, registered with the Department in 1973, was looted from the owner's house in occupied Famagusta after the invasion. Pieces that surfaced abroad were claimed by the owner or bought from middlemen, and "those objects restored by one means or another to their legal owner were finally bought by the Foundation from the collector and were presented to the Cyprus Museum" [2, p. 54]. Here the objects were identified, and the payment went to their lawful owner, not to the trade. Karageorghis also recorded the uglier side of the same case: "There are, of course, also instances of blackmail", and several pieces "were bought by the State from 'intermediaries' in order to save them" [3, p. 2]. The case is told in full in the Hadjiprodromou collection.

Every one of these objects went to a public museum, was given an inventory number, and was published with a photograph. The rate was one to four purchases from dealers a year.

The Church's payments for church art

The large payments were for church art taken from the occupied north, and they were of a different order from anything paid for archaeology.

• Lysi, 1983 to 1984. The frescoes of the chapel of Ayios Themonianos at Lysi were bought in Munich by the Menil Foundation of Houston, with the assent of the Church of Cyprus and the Department of Antiquities, at a price that Derek Fincham puts "near $520,000" [5, p. 307]. It was Menil money, not Cypriot, and ownership stayed with the Church; the frescoes came home in 2012. See the Lysi frescoes.
• Munich, 1997. For the operation that ended in the Munich raids on Aydın Dikmen's flats (Dikmen was never convicted of anything), the organiser "raises the equivalent of about $500,000 from the Cypriot church to fund the operation", in Mark Rose's account. On 6 September 1997 the intermediary, Michel van Rijn, having bought 25 frescoes "using $75,000 of his own money", "receives $168,000, of which $98,000 are expenses"; the next day he arranged "to purchase seven larger frescoes for $49,000" [6]. See the Munich seizure of 1997.
• Munich, 2015. For the 49 objects the Munich court held to be Dikmen's, Bishop Porphyrios said that "The Republic will not pay anything extra if it recovers these items through the auction", because "the amount will be offset against the €0.5m in fines which Dikmen has previously been ordered to pay the Church" [7]. Whether that auction took place is not on the published record.
• Kanakaria, 2018. Two medallions of the apse mosaic came back for fees. For St Andrew, a London dealer agreed to return it once his expenses were covered, and two Cypriot businessmen paid, as reported at the time [8]. St Mark was handed back by a British family who had bought it "in good faith", for "a small fee to cover restoration and storage costs" [9]. See the Kanakaria mosaics.
• The Dikmen estate, 2024. The last 60 objects from the Munich case, "24 ecclesiastical relics and 36 prehistoric and other antiquities", came back under an agreement signed in Munich in June 2024 [18]. An opinion column in the Cyprus Mail reported that the Bishop of Neapolis "went ahead on his own accord and paid the German authorities", and that the Department of Antiquities "also contributed financially"; the column opposed the payment, and no amount was published [10].
• Kykkos. In October 2024 the Cyprus Mail reported that the work of Kykkos Monastery had included "the purchase of many artefacts through auctions with an aim to repatriate them" [11]. No list has been published.

These payments are the evidence on which the criticism of buying back mostly rests, and they are on the page for that reason.

The court route: Kanakaria, Munich and the Dutch icons

Beside the purchases ran three long cases in foreign courts, all over church art, and each possible because the objects had been recorded in their churches before 1974.

Kanakaria, Indiana, 1989 to 1991. The Church and the Republic sued the Indianapolis buyer of four fragments of the Kanakaria apse mosaic, bought in Geneva in 1988 for $1.08 million. On 3 August 1989 the district court awarded possession to the Church: Indiana law applied, under which a thief passes no title, and the buyer would not have been in good faith under Swiss law either [13]. The Seventh Circuit affirmed on 24 October 1990, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case in 1991 [14]. The Church recovered the four fragments and paid nothing to the holder. Patty Gerstenblith notes that the owner bore the whole cost of the litigation [15, p. 358].

Munich, 1997 to 2024. After the raids of October 1997 the criminal case lapsed under German limitation rules, and the Republic and the Church brought a civil action in 2004 [16]. On 23 September 2010 the Landgericht München I ruled that about 240 sacred objects were to go back; to win, the claimants had to show for each object that it came from the north of Cyprus and had been taken against the owner's will [16]. The Oberlandesgericht largely upheld the ruling on 18 March 2013 [17], and 173 objects came back that year. In March 2015 the court ordered 34 more returned and held that the Republic had not proved its ownership of 49 others [7]. The last 60 came back by agreement in 2024 [18]. The case took 27 years from the seizure to the final return, and its end involved a reported payment.

The Dutch icons, Rotterdam, 1995 to 2013. Icons from Antiphonitis were consigned for sale at Christie's in 1995 and referred to the Cypriot authorities. The Church sued the holder. On 4 February 1999 the District Court of Rotterdam found that the Church had owned the icons until 1974, but held that the First Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention bound states, not private persons, and that the Netherlands had not given it effect in its own law [19, pp. 342–344]. The Church lost again on appeal in 2002. The icons came back only in September 2013, after the Netherlands passed an act in 2007 to give effect to the Protocol and the Cypriot government asked for them [20]. See the Dutch icons.

The comparison shows what each route needed. A court claim needed an identified object, a documented owner and a favourable law in the country where the object was found, and it took years and money. Purchase was quick, but it paid someone in the chain. For an undocumented pot there was no court claim to make at all.

What the Church said in 2024 and 2025

The Church has since stated where it stands. At a symposium in October 2024 Archbishop Georgios said that the Church, "instead of purchasing stolen artefacts, should claim their return through legal routes" [11].

In September 2025 Bishop Porphyrios of Neapolis, a member of the national committee against the trafficking of cultural heritage, described three ways of bringing objects back. The first is an attempt to convince the owner, once told the object was stolen, to return it without payment. "The second way is to claim objects presented at auction houses in cases where the cost of recovery will be less than reporting the case to Interpol and going to the courts." The third is "to report the case to Interpol, seize the object and resort to the courts", used for "objects of great value" and when the owner is not convinced [12]. The second route is often summarised as "buying is cheaper than going to court". The Bishop's word is "claim", not "buy", and the report does not say whether claiming at auction includes paying. What the statement does set out is a cost comparison with litigation.

The first route can work. In October 2026 two fourteenth-century icons of the Evangelists from Asinou, stolen after the invasion from the palace of the Metropolis of Kyrenia, came back from Britain "without compensation, as their owner did not seek payment" [25]. For archaeological objects, the Department's present practice is withdrawal from sale and voluntary handover, set out in policing and monitoring.

The case against buying back: Hardy's critique

The strongest criticism of the policy is Samuel Hardy's, made in three papers.

In the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research (2014) he wrote about the collections formed in 1963–74, which he called "government-mandated 'salvage' collections of looted antiquities" [21, p. 466]. In order to "rescue" looted artefacts from the international market, he wrote, the government reached a "silent accord" allowing Greek Cypriots with access to the Turkish Cypriot enclaves to buy illicit antiquities; he called it a "secret policy" and quoted a later Director, Sophocles Hadjisavvas, that all the collected antiquities were "illegal in the sense that they all came from illicit excavations" [21, p. 462].

In a chapter published in 2015 he extended the argument past 1974. Looters, he wrote, had taken well-known artefacts that could not be sold elsewhere in the "expect[ation] that the Cyprus government" or a proxy "would buy [them] back", citing Herscher; the Department and A. G. Leventis and his Foundation "have bought back looted antiquities from dealers", citing Karageorghis's own reports; and the 2007 arrest in the occupied north of a Greek Cypriot reported to be retrieving icons and artefacts for Church and State showed, in his reading, buying continuing in the north. His conclusion was that the "collaborative 'rescue' of looted artefacts actually funded the looting between 1963 and 1974", that the structure "remained fundamentally the same since 1974", and that the most important response was "for archaeologists and collectors to stop funding looting and destruction by 'rescuing' looted artefacts" [22].

In the International Journal of Cultural Property (2021) he set Cyprus among cases from Asia and Europe and concluded that "'Rescue' from the market creates a market for antiquities that can be 'rescued,' such as the publicly documented, 'portableised' artworks from churches in Cyprus, which could not have been sold to private collectors on the open market and were stolen in order to be ransomed back to the Republic of Cyprus". He added that the policy "creates a mechanism for the laundering and legalization of illicit assets", with the 1963–74 collections as his example [23, p. 17].

Parts of this are borne out by the buyers' own words. Karageorghis wrote of "blackmail" and of the State buying from "intermediaries" [3, p. 2]. In 1997 an intermediary was paid $70,000 above his stated expenses for one batch of frescoes [6]. The Church's own leaders proposed in 2024 to stop buying [11]. A buyer of last resort for unique, photographed church objects gives a thief a reason to steal them, and on that point the record supports Hardy.

The reply from the record

Hardy's argument is strongest where his examples are: church art. The 2021 conclusion names "artworks from churches", objects that "could not have been sold to private collectors on the open market" because they were documented. That does not describe a Red Polished jug from an unrecorded tomb, which can be sold on the open market and for which, as Karageorghis explained, there was no claim to bring [3, pp. 1–2]. The archaeological purchases were one to four objects a year, under a rule that excluded identifiable objects, and the one published price is over £8,000 for two pieces [2, p. 11; 3, p. 2]. The ordinary Cypriot pot sells for a few hundred dollars (in our own unpublished research, the median of 2,168 sold Cypriot vessels is about $820), and that is the market in which a looter is paid; the figures are in the economics of looting. A few purchases a year at the top of that market do not show a premium created for the ordinary material.

The purchases kept the objects in public hands. Each object the Foundation bought was given to the Cyprus Museum, registered, photographed and published in the Foundation's reports [2, pp. 53–80; 4, pp. 28–29]. The alternative under the law of the time was a private buyer, often abroad.

The bought pieces mostly had no recorded findspot. That was the stated rule [2, p. 11], and it is what the catalogue shows: most entries give no findspot. Where one is given, it cuts both ways. The bronze stand was dug by looters in 1972; a bronze head from the Sinda hoard was found clandestinely in 1971; the Hadjiprodromou picrolites probably came from Souskiou, a cemetery in the south looted before 1974 [2, pp. 58, 67]. Those objects were dug illicitly, but they were not taken from the occupied north, and the Foundation's description of its purchases as "repatriated" antiquities that left "as a result of the Turkish occupation" [2, p. 13] fits them only loosely. The word is the buyer's, and the findspots are reported here as the catalogue gives them.

The policy was public. Karageorghis described the 1963–73 collecting policy in a letter to Antiquity in 1976 (vol. 50, pp. 233–234), written in 1975, with every item registered on a card with a photograph [24]. The 1973 measure was a window for declaring collections under the 1935 law, not an amnesty statute. Hardy's own figure is that "more than 1250 people had become collectors" [21, p. 462], and his "almost half" Greek Cypriot share rests on 35 of 77 Severis objects that have a findspot, 31 of them from one cemetery, Alaas, by a method he calls "crude" [21, pp. 459, 470]. The post-1974 buying was stated in the Foundation's reports, the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique and Karageorghis's 1992 article, with the rule that limited it. "Secret" describes the absence of a statute, not concealment.

The record does not settle one question. Prices for almost every purchase are unpublished, so the effect of the buying on what looters were paid cannot be measured directly.

What the policy means for an object on the market today

The buying policy is ending. The Archbishop's line of 2024 is to claim, not to buy, and the Bishop of Neapolis's first route in 2025 is a return without payment [11; 12]. For archaeological objects the Department now asks auction houses to withdraw and holders to hand over, and the cases of 2025 and 2026 are recorded without payments.

For an owner, the record has two practical points. First, the state's own practice for fifty years treated undocumented Cypriot antiquities on the London market as objects to be bought and put in a museum, not as objects to be seized; how the market now reads them is set out in the 1974 presumption. Second, the court cases turned on documents: the Church won where it had photographs and lost where the law of the market country did not help it. The same is true for a private owner. An export licence, a sale receipt, an old label or a published photograph is what makes an object's history checkable; see the export licences and labels and collecting Cypriot antiquities today. Owners who are unsure of an object's history, or who are thinking of returning or donating a piece, can contact us.