Looting in Occupied Northern Cyprus after 1974

In November 1979 the Republic of Cyprus received word that the apse of the Panagia Kanakaria, a church outside the village of Lythrankomi in the Karpas peninsula, was bare. Its sixth-century mosaic, the Virgin enthroned with an adolescent Christ on her lap, an archangel beside them and a border of apostle medallions, had been prised off the wall at some point after the village's Greek Cypriot congregation was forced to leave in 1976 [1, p. 63; 2, p. 234]. Nine years later four fragments of it were sold in the free zone of Geneva airport to a dealer from Indianapolis, and the lawsuit that followed made the Kanakaria mosaics the best-known case of what this entry describes: the removal of icons, frescoes, mosaics and antiquities from the northern third of Cyprus after the Turkish invasion of July 1974, an area the Republic and the Church of Cyprus have not been able to protect since [3, p. 463]. The best-documented losses are ecclesiastical, cut from church walls and moved through Munich to buyers in western Europe and North America, but the looting also reached a registered private collection in Famagusta, the icon stores at Kyrenia and the cemeteries of the north. This entry is the summary of the occupied north after 1974, where each case has its own page: it outlines the sites, the network, the court cases and the recoveries, then the argument over how much was taken. It is the counterpart of the entry on the legal export of Cypriot antiquities: the objects discussed here left without paper, because north of the line there was no longer anyone with the authority to issue it.

The occupation and the first losses

The north in 1974: what lay beyond the line

Turkey invaded on 20 July 1974. Some 200,000 Greek Cypriots were forced to leave their homes in the north, and the arrangements that followed moved the Greek population south and the Turkish and Muslim population north, leaving churches in the north, and mosques in the south, abandoned [4]. A "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus" ("TRNC") was declared in 1983 in the occupied area; it is illegitimate and has been recognised by no state except Turkey [2, p. 234]. The occupied area is about 37 per cent of the island [5, p. 129], and it holds a large share of what Cypriot archaeology had spent the previous century excavating: the Late Bronze Age town of Enkomi, the city and royal cemetery of Salamis, the Bronze Age cemeteries of Lapithos on the north coast, the harbour town and castle of Kyrenia, and several hundred churches. Thomas Kline, an American lawyer who worked with the Republic and the Church for almost twenty-five years, summarised the result as "pervasive looting of churches, museums, private collections, and archeological sites" in the area kept beyond the reach of the government and the Church [3, p. 463].

The first outside observer had limited access. UNESCO appointed a Canadian restoration architect, Jacques Dalibard, as adviser on the cultural heritage of Cyprus in 1974; he inspected sites on both sides in 1975, but in the occupied area newly pillaged places such as the monastery of Antiphonitis could not be visited, and his report was never published [5, p. 131]. The Cyprus Ministry of Foreign Affairs later estimated that more than 550 Greek Orthodox churches and religious buildings in the north had been pillaged or destroyed, some converted to mosques, storehouses or barns [4]. Sophocles Hadjisavvas, a former Director of the Department of Antiquities, put the figure at some 500 churches ill-treated or deliberately destroyed, and described Enkomi and Salamis as lying neglected [5, p. 130].

From opportunism to organisation, 1974 to 1982

The pattern of the first decade was set out in 1989 by Ymenus van der Werff, general rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, after a visit to the island. Most damage to immovable cultural property had occurred in the north and was the result of looting, and the thefts were "evidently linked to the highly professional international market in illegally exported art". After "early opportunist raids during the unsettled period following 1974", he wrote, "more organised looting of selected targets seems to have taken place between 1977 and 1982" [5, p. 131]. The two phases are told in opportunist raids, 1974 to 1977 and organised looting, 1977 to 1982.

One of the earliest recorded losses was a private collection. A Famagusta collector, Chr. Hadjiprodromou, had formed a large collection, mostly Chalcolithic painted pottery and stone figurines, which the Department of Antiquities registered in 1973. It began to be looted a year after the Turkish army occupied Famagusta. Because it was registered and numbered, pieces could be recognised when they surfaced, several of them in a Christie's London catalogue of 27 April 1976, and the A. G. Leventis Foundation bought back what could be recovered for the Cyprus Museum, among it a seated cruciform figurine of light green picrolite, Hadjiprodromou no. 889 [6, pp. 54, 58]. The Chalcolithic picrolite figures that came back are of the same class as the picrolite figurines on display in the Cyprus Museum; the case is told in the Hadjiprodromou collection.

Church property gathered after 1974 was not safe in store either. Thousands of icons from churches across the occupied area were kept in the castle at Kyrenia [5, p. 130], and in 1981 the storeroom was burgled and hundreds of paintings disappeared; the Turkish Cypriot official accused of altering the inventory was tried and not convicted [1, p. 213]. That story is in the Kyrenia castle icon depot.

The name that runs through the church cases is Aydın Dikmen, a Turkish dealer based in Munich, who was never convicted of anything [7]. Turkish and Turkish Cypriot reporting of the 1980s placed him at the international end of a network whose local side was attributed to Mehmet Ali İlkman; those accounts are set out, as accounts, in Turkish Cypriot accounts. What the network moved was overwhelmingly church art: icons, frescoes and mosaics, a different trade from archaeology, as church art and antiquities explains.

The church cases

The best-documented losses from the north are ecclesiastical, and each of the main cases has its own page. This section gives the outline.

The Lysi frescoes

Thirteenth-century murals from the dome and apse of a small chapel near Lysi were cut into 38 pieces and shown in 1983 to the Menil Foundation of Houston in a Munich apartment, with a story that they came from a ruined church in Anatolia [3, p. 463; 4]. The Menil wrote to the countries once part of the Byzantine Empire, and only Cyprus could document the church. With the consent of the Church of Cyprus, which held title, the Foundation bought the fragments in 1984, conserved and showed them in Houston, and returned them in March 2012; they are now in the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia [3, p. 463; 4]. The case is told in the Lysi frescoes.

The Kanakaria mosaics

The sixth-century apse mosaic of the Panagia Kanakaria was published in full by A. H. S. Megaw and E. J. W. Hawkins in 1977, with photographs of every figure [9; 1, p. 61]. It was removed between August 1976 and October 1979, after the villagers had been moved south [2, p. 234]. Two medallions came back in 1984 [1, pp. 63, 76]. In July 1988 four more fragments were sold in the free zone of Geneva airport to an Indianapolis dealer, with the Dutch dealer Michel van Rijn acting as intermediary, and were then offered to the J. Paul Getty Museum, whose curator informed Cyprus [2, pp. 235–236]. The Church and the Republic sued, and on 3 August 1989 the federal court in Indianapolis awarded the mosaics to the Church; the Seventh Circuit affirmed in 1990 [10]. The sale is told in the Kanakaria mosaics, and the law in Church of Cyprus v. Goldberg. Patty Gerstenblith treats the case as the model of the first generation of American recovery suits, in which the owner bore the cost of litigation [7].

Antiphonitis, Munich and the Dutch icons

The twelfth-century church of Christ Antiphonitis in the Kyrenia district lost its Last Judgement and Tree of Jesse to wall-cutters after 1974 [11, pp. 73-74]. Both turned up in Munich in October 1997, when the Bavarian police seized Dikmen's stock [11, p. 74]. The Church and the Republic sued for the objects in Germany, the Munich Court of Appeal ordered 173 of them returned in 2013 [5, p. 138; 12, p. 34], a second group came back in 2015 [16, p. 36], and a third in 2024. Four sixteenth-century icons from the Antiphonitis iconostasis, bought in the Netherlands in the 1970s, were seized when offered at Christie's in 1995; the Dutch courts found for the buyers, and the icons came back in September 2013 after the Netherlands enacted the 1954 Hague Convention [12, p. 33]. The cases are told in Antiphonitis, the Munich seizure of 1997 and the Dutch icons.

Archaeological losses and the numbers

Archaeological sites, museums and excavation archives

The antiquities side of the story is less well documented than the churches, partly because the objects are less individual: a cruciform figurine has no fresco scar to match.

The excavated sites passed out of the Department's control with their stores. Karageorghis, looking back in 2019 on the Department's excavations at Salamis between 1952 and 1974, wrote that had he waited to publish while the material sat in the museum at Famagusta, the Salamis necropolis would never have been published. Since 1999 the University of Ankara has excavated at Salamis, work he regarded as a breach of the international conventions on archaeological work in occupied territory [13, p. 31]. The royal tombs belong to the eighth and seventh centuries BC, the Cypro-Archaic period, and the story of their publication is told in the article on Karageorghis. Hadjisavvas, who sat for six years on the bicommunal Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage, reports that the Turkish Cypriot side refused his proposal for urgent work at Late Bronze Age Enkomi, even after a UN-commissioned technical assessment, on the ground that jurisdiction over Enkomi and Salamis had passed to Ankara University; the Neolithic settlement of Agios Epiktetos-Vrysi, on the committee's 2009 priority list, had seen no work either [5, p. 135]. He also recorded recent large-scale looting in the necropolis of Agia Irini in the north-west, which he saw himself [5, p. 132]. The fate of the museums and stores is told in museums and excavation stores in the north.

Van der Werff's expert adviser, Cormack, put part of the loss down to capacity. The Department of Antiquities in the south was better equipped to deal with climate, earthquakes and the pressures of development; in the north, inexperience, lack of expertise and lack of funds were "in part responsible for the losses of material which have occurred since 1974", archaeologists had been trained at Ankara in Ottoman and Classical antiquities with little knowledge of medieval Christian art, and the archaeologist in Famagusta lacked the library to catalogue the private collections [5, p. 132]. The Turkish Cypriot authorities in the occupied north passed antiquities legislation of its own, which Hadjisavvas describes as contrary to the Republic's Antiquities Law [5, p. 131]. Fehlmann records that since 1986 it has banned the export of any object more than a hundred years old, while allowing private owners to keep collections registered by 1996, and that because the "TRNC" is recognised only by Turkey it cannot ratify the UNESCO Convention or make agreements on the transfer of cultural property [8, pp. 146, 152].

How much was taken: the argument over numbers

The figures in circulation differ by an order of magnitude. The Cyprus police have estimated that as many as 60,000 cultural objects were removed and sent abroad after 1974 [4], and Hadjisavvas gives the same figure for ancient and medieval artefacts [5, p. 130]; a reference work puts the church losses at some 20,000 icons and dozens of frescoes [11, p. 73]. Marc Fehlmann rejects the 60,000 figure for archaeological material. A count of every antiquities sale at Christie's and Sotheby's between 1988 and 2008 found 1,842 identifiably Cypriot lots out of 52,482, about 4 per cent; sixty thousand objects, he argues, would have collapsed prices, and a few thousand is the likelier figure for antiquities that left the north illegally [8, pp. 154-158]. Turkish Cypriot archaeologists add that the embargo on fieldwork in the north has itself harmed the heritage by blocking rescue excavation [14, pp. 143-144], and Samuel Hardy that paying to recover church art made it worth stealing [15]. The argument is set out in full in how much was taken.

Law, recovery and documentation

Law, agreements and the position today

The Republic ratified the 1970 UNESCO Convention in 1979 and the Second Protocol to the Hague Convention in 2001, and in the same year set up a police unit for stolen cultural property [8, p. 146; 2, p. 239]. In 1999 it became one of the first source countries to reach an agreement with the United States, covering church material first and archaeological material from 2002 [3, p. 465; 8, pp. 146-147]. These instruments are set out in UNESCO 1970 and the Hague Convention and the US memorandum and designated list. Recoveries continued case by case, by lawsuit, by negotiation and by purchase; buying back and the returns of 2023 to 2026 cover them, and Kline recommends that Cyprus publish a public database of losses [3, pp. 468-469].

On the island, the leaders of the two communities created a bicommunal Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage in April 2008. It has restored or stabilised some twenty monuments, mostly churches and mosques, with European Commission funds, and in 2010 it completed an inventory of 2,300 sites in the occupied area, which remains unpublished because the two sides could not agree its wording [5, pp. 134-135]. Looting did not stop with the cooperation: two fragments of twelfth-century wall painting from the monastery of Panagia Apsinthiotissa near Kyrenia, bought on the illicit market by a Canadian collector and donated back, were exhibited at the House of Lords in December 2014 [5, p. 133]. How the organised trade wound down after 1997 is told in the decline after 1997.

Documented export and the northern trade

The contrast with the lawful trade is in the paper. Northern objects travelled with documents that did not survive inspection: an export licence in the name of authorities in the occupied north who later called it a fake, a forged Turkish permit, a cover story about an Anatolian contractor [2, p. 235; 4]. They could not carry anything better, since the only authority able to issue a licence, the Republic's Department of Antiquities, had no presence in the north, and the Turkish Cypriot authorities that did hold the ground could not join the conventions that give an export permit international effect [8, p. 146]. Lawfully exported Cypriot antiquities carry a different kind of record: a museum accession number, a dealer's name, a Cyprus Museum sale, an export permit. The Metropolitan Museum's Chalcolithic picrolite figure, for instance, was bought in 1951 from the Paris and Geneva dealer Nicolas Koutoulakis; the British Museum's Red Polished tulip bowl from Vounous (1939,0217.3) was bought from James Stewart, who excavated the cemetery. How the island's lawful trade produced such records is set out in the article on the Cyprus Museum saleroom and the article on private collecting.

The same logic runs through the recoveries. The Hadjiprodromou figurines came back because they had registration numbers; Kanakaria came back because Dumbarton Oaks had photographed every medallion in 1977; Lysi came back because Cyprus could show Brownell where the church stood. The practical conclusions for a buyer, that an object of a northern type with no history before 1974 needs particular care and that church material needs more, are drawn in the entry on collecting Cypriot antiquities today; the wider history is told in How Cyprus's Past Was Sold, the article on UNESCO 1970 and the article on provenance and provenience. The Church told the Indianapolis court in 1989 that it meant to re-establish its congregation at Lythrankomi when conditions allowed [10; 3, p. 464]. Kline, writing in 2012, described the church it would return to: a "huge scar" in the apse wall where the mosaic had been, and a building stripped of its icons [3, p. 464].