Repatriations, 2023 to 2026: The Returns of Cypriot Antiquities and Church Art Read as a Body of Cases

Between January 2023 and October 2026 the Department of Antiquities, the Church of Cyprus and the Cyprus Police announced about twenty-two returns of Cypriot objects from abroad, together at least 375 objects. Read together, the announcements show a consistent pattern. Most of the objects are ordinary pottery and lamps of the classes that left the island in quantity while export was lawful. Most came back because a holder agreed to hand them over, usually after a sale catalogue was spotted or after an owner or heir decided to give them up. Almost none of the announcements say where or when an object was dug, or when it left Cyprus. The cases that do carry a theft record are church art from the occupied north, plus the last of the objects seized from Aydın Dikmen in Munich. This page groups the cases by route rather than listing each one again: the auction withdrawals of 2025 and 2026 are set out case by case in policing and monitoring, and are summarised here. The photograph at the head of the page shows the church of the Panagia Phorviotissa at Asinou, in the Troodos mountains, whose two 14th-century icons of the Evangelists came back from Britain in October 2026 [15].

The cases by route

The table counts the announced returns from 2023 to October 2026 by the way they came about. A "case" is one announcement of one handover; some cover a single juglet, others more than a hundred objects. Figures given as "over" or "more than" in an announcement are counted at that lower figure, so the totals are minimums.

The one row in which the origin is known, from a court record or a theft, is the last. In the other eighteen cases, about four objects in five of the whole, the announcement says the object is Cypriot and gives its date and ware, and says nothing that would tell a reader whether it was dug in 1890, in 1965 or in 1995.

Returns from the saleroom

The largest group of cases, though not of objects, begins with a sale catalogue. The Department's officers watch online sales abroad; when they see a Cypriot lot they object to, they write to the house, the lot is withdrawn, and the holder hands the object to the nearest Cypriot embassy or high commission. The nine cases of 2024 to 2026 are all at small regional or online houses in Britain, the United States, France and Canada, and all but one concern a single pot or a small group: Bichrome, Black-on-Red, White Painted and Base Ring jugs and juglets, a terracotta quadriga, a Black Polished bowl, and one group of seventeen vessels with a limestone head. The table of those cases, with the houses as the announcements name them, is in policing and monitoring.

One case that the policing table leaves out is the earliest of the run. A Late Bronze Age ring-shaped vessel "of Cypriot origin" was found by the Department in an online sale in February 2024; the French authorities "were immediately informed and intervened", and the owner agreed to hand it over voluntarily. It was given to the embassy in Paris in July and announced as repatriated on 1 November 2024 [8]. The pattern is the one that runs through every later withdrawal: the announcement thanks the authorities and the holder, uses the words "voluntarily" or "decided to return it", and makes no claim about how the object left Cyprus [8; 16; 17].

Two single objects came back in 2025 from Belgium and Germany, a Bichrome IV amphora handed over in Brussels on 6 August and a seal stone returned from Germany in June, without any account of how they were found [12]. They are counted separately because the reports give no route.

Returns from private holders and heirs

The two largest returns of 2023 and 2024 that did not involve the police were gifts by private people, made without any sale in prospect.

On 20 May 2023, 36 Cypriot objects, from stone tools to glass vessels, lamps, metalwork and a piece of stone sculpture, Bronze Age to Roman, were escorted from Canberra and Sydney to the Cyprus Museum. The Department described the return as made possible by "the considerate initiatives of private individuals in Australia", and thanked the Australian authorities and staff at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney who helped [2]. The announcement does not say who the holders were or how the objects reached Australia.

On 26 July 2024, 37 objects came back from Stuttgart: ceramic vessels from the Early and Middle Bronze Age, around 2000 BCE, to the medieval period, and clay lamps from the Cypro-Classical to the Late Roman period [6; 7]. The announcement gives a history for them, which is rare. They "had been removed from Cyprus between 1964 and 1968 by a German citizen" who was "at the time working at the German Embassy in Cyprus" [7]. He died in 2023, and his heir contacted the Cypriot embassy in Berlin "expressing her desire for the objects to be handed over to the Cypriot authorities" [7]. The announcement does not say whether an export permit was ever issued. In those years the export of antiquities from the Republic required a permit, and one was granted for registered objects not needed by the Cyprus Museum; the rules are in the legal export of Cypriot antiquities. Whether these 37 pieces left with a permit or without one, they were bought or given on the island in the decade before the invasion and held in a private house in Germany for sixty years. They are the most explicit example in the record of what most Cypriot material abroad is: an old collection reaching an heir.

The two large mixed returns also included private gifts. The return of "over 80" objects from the United States, completed on 26 April 2023, comprised clay and glass vessels, a limestone sculpture, coins and a fragment of an ecclesiastical wall painting, from about 2000 BCE to the 18th century CE. They had been "handed over to the Embassy of the Republic of Cyprus in Washington by the USA authorities or by private individuals"; the Department thanked Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI, US Customs and Border Protection and the State Department, and cited the bilateral cultural property agreement between the two countries [1]. The announcement does not say which objects were seized and which were given. The London return of 3 December 2024, more than 100 objects from Neolithic stone tools to Roman lamps, coins and 19th- and early 20th-century icons, was likewise made up of pieces withdrawn from auctions after Cypriot requests and pieces handed in by people living in Britain [9]. It is described in policing and monitoring.

Returns through police, prosecutors and courts

Three returns of archaeological objects came through criminal proceedings abroad.

On 17 July 2023 the Carabinieri handed three Bronze Age pottery vessels, of about 1600 to 1400 BCE, to the Cypriot ambassador in Rome. They had been "seized by the Italian authorities as part of penal proceedings", and the competent court in Florence ordered their return after Cyprus asked for it [3]. The announcement gives no findspot and no account of the proceedings.

In March 2025 the Manhattan District Attorney's office returned twelve objects to Cyprus from several investigations, one of them concerning the London dealer Robin Symes, who died in 2023 [13]; that return is set out in the Symes returns of 2025.

On 4 August 2025 the FBI returned a terracotta quadriga and a Bichrome flask, found on a New York gallery's website after a request from the Cyprus Police under a mutual legal assistance treaty. The gallery gave them up voluntarily, "at a financial loss to themselves", and the FBI described them as "believed to have been illegally looted" [14]. It did not say when or from where.

These are the returns most often read as proof of looting, and they come closest to it: a court in Florence, a prosecutor in New York and a federal agency each acted on the view that the objects were held unlawfully. None of them published a findspot, a date of digging or a date of export. A criminal route shows that a foreign authority was satisfied the object should go back; it does not show where or when the object was dug.

Church art: the Dikmen return and the icons

Church art is a separate trade from archaeology: icons, frescoes, mosaics and liturgical objects, most of them medieval or later. See church art and antiquities.

The returns with a theft record are almost all church art, and almost all from the occupied north.

The largest is the last of the Munich case. In 1997 the Bavarian police seized the stock of the Turkish dealer Aydın Dikmen, who was never convicted of anything; among it were 318 objects of Cypriot origin, from more than fifty Orthodox, Maronite and Armenian churches, from archaeological sites and from private collections in the north [5]. After years of litigation in Munich, returns followed in July 2013 and August 2015 (the Cyprus Mail gives 173 and 85 objects) [5]. Under an agreement signed in Munich in June 2024, a final 60 objects were returned, 24 of them ecclesiastical and 36 prehistoric and other antiquities [4]; they were handed over on 20 June 2024 and shown at a ceremony at the Cyprus Museum on 22 July 2024. At that ceremony the Bishop of Karpasia, Christophoros, speaking for the Archbishop, said that although Dikmen had died in 2020, "his heirs unfortunately still possess, and traffic stolen cultural goods from Cyprus" [5]. That is the Bishop's statement; no heir has been named in any public source, and no proceedings against anyone have been reported. The 36 non-church objects are among the very few archaeological objects of the period whose removal after 1974 from the occupied north rests on a court record. The case is told in the Munich seizure of 1997.

The Church also recovers icons on its own. Bishop Porphyrios of Neapolis, for the national committee, said in September 2025 that 13 icons had been "repatriated from London" in 2024 and handed to the Bishop of Constantia [11]; it is not stated whether these were the icons in the London group of December 2024. An icon of Christ was returned from Düsseldorf in April 2025, and an icon of the Virgin was then about to come back from Slovakia [10; 11]. In October 2026 the Metropolis of Morphou announced the return from the United Kingdom of the two 14th-century icons of the Evangelists Matthew and Mark from Asinou. They had been moved before the invasion to the palace of the Metropolis of Kyrenia, were "smuggled following the 1974 Turkish invasion", and came back "without compensation", because their owner "did not seek payment" [15]. The Church's thefts and recoveries are set out in church art in the north.

Porphyrios described the order the committee follows: first to persuade the holder "to return it to Cyprus without any payment"; then to "claim objects presented at auction houses" where "the cost of recovery will be less than reporting the case to Interpol"; and for objects of great value, where the holder refuses, to "report the case to Interpol, seize the object and resort to the courts" [11]. The Asinou icons came back by the first route, which is also the route of almost every archaeological return on this page. When the Church or the Republic does pay, the record is in the state as buyer.

Two earlier church-art cases from countries that often return Cypriot material fall just outside these years, and are mentioned here only so that their absence from the table is not misread. The Netherlands returned four Antiphonitis icons under the First Protocol to the Hague Convention in September 2013 (see the Dutch icons), and an Antiphonitis icon withdrawn from a Zurich sale in 2014 came back in July 2022 (see Antiphonitis). The Department's archaeological officer listed both countries in 2025 among those from which Cypriot objects are "mainly" repatriated [10].

What the announcements say about origin

Taken as a whole, the announcements of 2023 to 2026 report the object, its date, its ware or type, the country and sometimes the house, the route, and the people thanked. On origin they say four kinds of thing:

• Nothing (most cases). The object is "Cypriot", "of Cypriot origin" or returned to "its country of origin" [2; 8; 16; 17]. This covers every saleroom withdrawal, the Australian and American gifts, and the Belgian and German single objects.
• A date of removal from Cyprus, without a findspot: the Stuttgart group, taken between 1964 and 1968 [7], and the Cyprus Mail's statement that many of the London objects were "exported illegally in the 1960s and 1970s" [9]. Both point to the decade before the invasion, when export was by permit and much was collected on the island.
• A legal finding, without a findspot: the Florence court, the Manhattan prosecutor and the FBI's "believed to have been illegally looted" [3; 13; 14].
• A theft from a named place, for church art only: the churches and collections of the occupied north in the Dikmen case, and the Metropolis of Kyrenia for the Asinou icons [5; 15].

None of the archaeological announcements names a tomb or a site. None says that an object was dug after 1974. None names a trafficker. The withdrawals rest on the absence of a checkable history, which is the 1974 presumption at work: the Department does not need to show that a pot was looted to ask for it back, and the holder, faced with an unsaleable lot, usually agrees.

The venues point the same way. The withdrawals are at regional and online houses; the gifts come from private houses in Australia and Germany and from people in Britain and the United States; the one gallery case is a website. The material these channels handle is, in the main, the contents of old collections and estates: house clearances, the possessions of people who lived or served in Cyprus, and family pieces whose paper has been lost. The Stuttgart case states it outright. For the saleroom cases the announcements thank "the donors" or the "holder" and do not say who they were [16; 17], so the estate origin is the general pattern of the trade, not a fact stated for any single case.

The evidence against this reading

The strongest objection is that some of these returns really were of stolen or looted objects, and that an announcement which says nothing about origin does not show that the object was innocent.

Both halves of that are true. The Dikmen return is the product of a criminal seizure and a civil judgment, and 36 of its 60 objects are archaeology, not church art [4; 5]. The Asinou icons were stolen after the invasion [15]. The Italian vessels were seized in criminal proceedings [3], the Symes investigation concerned objects "smuggled out of Cyprus" [13], and the FBI believed its two objects had been looted [14]. In London, the Cyprus Mail reported that many of the objects had left the island illegally before and around 1974 [9]. And much of what was collected on the island before 1974 had been dug illicitly, whatever its later export paper showed; collecting under the silent accord sets out how much. A pot with no findspot may have been dug by a farmer in 1965 as easily as by an excavator in 1905.

The proportion answers it. Of the twenty-two cases, two rest on a theft record or a court finding about where the objects came from: the Dikmen return and the Asinou icons, 62 objects, about one in six of the total. Adding the other icons the Church identified as its own brings the share to about one in five. Adding the three criminal cases that give no findspot brings it to about a quarter of the objects. The remainder, at least 280 objects in fifteen cases, are pots, lamps, tools and small sculpture returned on request or as gifts, with no date of digging and, in all but two cases, no date of export. Where the stolen material is identified, it is church art from the occupied north, or the Dikmen stock, which was itself a northern seizure. No return of the period names a site in the Republic as the source of a looted object.

The returns also say little about the top of the market. None of them is from Christie's, Sotheby's or Bonhams, where Cypriot lots are offered with a checkable history; the cheap venues are where the Department looks and where it finds what it asks for. That is consistent with the economics of looting: undocumented Cypriot pottery sells for little, which is why the holders give it up.

What this means for an object on the market today

An undocumented Cypriot antiquity offered at a regional or online saleroom between 2023 and 2026 had a real chance of being seen, objected to and withdrawn, and the usual end of such a case was a voluntary handover. The record does not show that such objects were looted. It shows that, without paper, the Department asks for them and the holder usually agrees. An object with a checkable history is in a different position: a numbered export licence, a Cyprus Museum seal, a dealer's receipt, a family record of when it was brought home, or a publication before 1974. How to read that paper is in the article on export licences and labels, and the stages of an object's history are explained in provenance and provenience. An object that matches a registration card from a collection lost in the occupied north, or an icon from a named church, is stolen property whatever its later history.

For an heir or owner, the Stuttgart and Australian returns show one lawful outcome, a gift to Cyprus, which the guide to returning or donating explains. Declared pieces with a lawful history can be sold in specific circumstances, and the guides on antiquities in an estate, objects brought home from Cyprus, selling in the UK and selling in the US set out when. The current rules are in collecting Cypriot antiquities today. If the history is unclear, or a lot has been withdrawn, contact us before deciding anything; there is almost always a lawful next step.