Mehmet Ali İlkman and the Network inside the Occupied North

The trade in church art taken from the occupied north of Cyprus after the Turkish invasion of 1974 had a buyer and store abroad, in Munich, and a local side on the island. In May 1989 the Turkish journalist Özgen Acar described that local side as a gang with a Munich "international boss", Aydın Dikmen, and a "local boss" in Nicosia, the Turkish Cypriot former paramilitary and intelligence agent Mehmet Ali İlkman, known as "Tremeşeli" [3; 2, p. 129]. A few days later a deputy read Acar's description of İlkman as "Denktaş's right arm" into the record of the assembly in the occupied north [4; 2, p. 129]. Every part of that description is an allegation. İlkman was never charged or tried for any of it, and when he died on 26 November 2012 the Turkish Cypriot news agency announced a ceremony in front of the assembly and burial with military honours [5]. This page follows his part across the cases of 1975 to 1982, the people the Turkish Cypriot record names in those years, and what the local network is shown to have handled. Most of what is known comes from inside the north: from a Turkish Cypriot newspaper series of 1982, from the letters of the Turkish Cypriot antiquities department that it quoted, and from Turkish Cypriot deputies. The photograph at the head of the page shows Kyrenia harbour and the castle that served as a depot for icons after 1974.

The "local boss" in the reporting of 1989

The description of the network as a hierarchy comes from Acar's articles in the Istanbul daily Cumhuriyet in May 1989, above all "İşte çete" ("This is the gang") of 27 May [3]. Acar gave the roles Turkish names: Dikmen was the uluslararası patron, the "international boss", and İlkman the yerel patron, the "local boss"; below them he set a director, a remover and a lookout, and around them a circle of associates [2, pp. 129–130]. He wrote that İlkman had been "impossible" for the police to touch until 1989 [3, p. 13; 2, p. 129].

On 2 June 1989 the assembly of the Turkish Cypriot administration, which had declared itself the "TRNC" in 1983, a state recognised only by Turkey, held a preliminary debate on a motion by the deputy N. Talât for a parliamentary inquiry into antiquities smuggling. The record of that debate quotes Acar's phrase for İlkman, "Denktaş'ın sağ kolu", "Denktaş's right arm" [4, p. 7865; 2, p. 129]. Rauf Denktaş was then the Turkish Cypriot leader, as he had been the leader of the Turkish Cypriot paramilitary organisation TMT when İlkman served in it [2, p. 129].

These are a journalist's reconstruction and a deputy's quotation of it. No court tested them. No charge against İlkman over Cypriot church art or antiquities is recorded, before 1989 or after it. The historian of the trade Samuel Hardy, who set out the 1989 material in 2021, put the matter in one sentence: "It is difficult to disentangle the criminal, social and political sources of İlkman's practical impunity, but it is impossible to deny his impunity" [2, p. 129]. That is Hardy's judgement on the record, not a finding of any court.

İlkman's public career and his death

Outside the trade, İlkman's career is known from his own account and from his obituary. In an interview republished in 2007 he said that he had fought in TMT during the intercommunal conflict, served as a member of the Turkish Cypriot Communal Chamber under the 1960 Republic, and worked as an agent of Turkey's intelligence service, MİT, from the 1960s into the years after the invasion [2, p. 129]. His obituary confirms the seat in the Communal Chamber [5].

The Turkish Cypriot news agency TAK reported his death on 26 November 2012. It called him "one of the leading names of TMT", remembered in the Turkish Cypriot struggle as "Tremeşeli", and said that he had died aged 76 of lung cancer, against which he had been fighting for some time. A ceremony was to be held for him in front of the assembly building, and he was then to be buried in the Nicosia cemetery with a military ceremony [5]. The report did not mention antiquities.

The people the Turkish Cypriot record names, 1975 to 1982

The fullest account of the trade in its early years is "Perishing Cyprus", a four-part series by the Turkish Cypriot journalist Mehmet Yaşın in the Nicosia weekly Olay in April and May 1982, printed in English in 1985 in the record of a hearing of the United States Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe [1, pp. 137–152]. It was written from inside the north, about the author's own administration, and it quoted that administration's own letters. It is the earliest detailed record of the trade, and its authority comes from where it was written. The series and the assembly debates are set out in full in Turkish Cypriot accounts.

Olay does not name İlkman. It names three people in the cases that later reporting placed in his network, and they appear here only as Olay and the 1989 debate describe them.

• İsfendiyar Rıfat Açıksöz, the mayor of Morphou and a licensed antiques dealer. A ministry letter of 1977, quoted by Olay, records that inquiries completed on 3 October 1975 into 217 antiquities confiscated from his shop found that some bore the initials "OHL" and numbers matching the registered collection of Christakis Hadjiloizides, a Greek Cypriot collector of Morphou, and that 72 more were found in his house [1, p. 150]. Olay reported later sales from the same source to foreign visitors in 1980 to 1982, and wrote that "no legal measures have so far been taken" against him [1, p. 151]. It also recorded that he had been fined over an illegal dig at Polis and cleared by the High Court [1, p. 150]. No conviction of Açıksöz is recorded. The case is told in the Morphou mayor's shop.
• Christakis Hadjiloizides, the collector, appears in the record only as the owner whose marked objects were found in the shop. His collection had been registered with the Republic's Department of Antiquities, which completed its record of declared collections in December 1973 [8, p. 233]; that registration is what allowed Turkish Cypriot officials to identify his objects in 1975.
• Mehmet Rasıh Savarona, director of the Kyrenia branch of the Turkish Cypriot antiquities department. After 225 icons were found missing from the depot in Kyrenia castle in 1981, he was removed from his post and tried before a criminal court sitting in the castle in the spring of 1982 [1, p. 144]. Olay reported the evidence given by Turkish Cypriot witnesses, among them archaeologists of his own department, that inventory numbers had been changed and pages rewritten [1, p. 151]. The outcome of the trial is not recorded in the published accounts. The depot and the trial are told in the Kyrenia castle icon depot.

Olay described the system behind these cases without naming its head: "As everything has a MAFIA in our country, so there is a MAFIA dealing in antique smuggling. The membership of this gang of antique smugglers extends to antique traders, certain political personalities and foreign missions. Its net extends as far as Turkey, Germany and Britain" [1, p. 150]. It added that an investigating committee of the assembly had reported on the matter the year before, and that its findings had gone to the government and the judiciary [1, p. 150]. In its last paragraphs it reported that Dikmen had been arrested in Kyrenia the week before [1, p. 152]. Seven years later Acar's articles put names to the structure Olay had described, listing Açıksöz and Savarona among the associates of the gang under İlkman and Dikmen [3; 2, p. 130]. The link between those two men and İlkman is Acar's, made in 1989; the 1982 series does not make it.

Mehmet Ali Ahmet and the Ankara chests

On 16 March 1981 three chests labelled "personal property", sent from Tymbou airport in the north to an address in Germany, were opened at Ankara airport and found to hold 158 objects, among them icons sawn into pieces from the monastery of St Barnabas and from the Kyrenia castle depot [1, pp. 143–144]. Olay named the sender: "The 'personal property' in the chests was dispatched by Mehmet Ali Ahmet." It reported rumours that he was the thief, said that "there was no sufficient evidence regarding this issue", and added that he had once been held by soldiers while digging in the churchyard of Ayios Amvrosios [1, p. 144]. No charge against him is recorded. The case is told in the Ankara airport seizure of 1981.

Mehmet Ali Ahmet is not shown by any source to be Mehmet Ali İlkman. Turkish Cypriots of that generation often used a father's name as a second name, and surnames were adopted later, so "Mehmet Ali Ahmet" (Mehmet Ali, son of Ahmet) and "Mehmet Ali İlkman" could be the same man or two different men. Olay does not connect the sender with any boss, and Hardy's summary of Acar's 1989 account does not mention the chests. The identification is unresolved, and this page treats them as two people.

What the local network handled

The cases attached to the network are overwhelmingly cases of church art. Drawing on Acar and the 1989 debate, Hardy lists works taken by the gang from at least fifty religious and other heritage sites in the north: wall paintings from churches at Nicosia, Akanthou, Kalo Chorio Kapouti, Kalogrea (the Antiphonitis), Koma tou Yialou, Lysi and Sychari; the mosaics of the Panagia Kanakaria at Lythrangomi; icons from churches and monasteries at Kalo Chorio Kapouti, Koutsovendis, Palaiosofos and Trikomo and from Kyrenia castle; icons, human remains and a Bible from Ayios Mamas at Morphou; and a historic sword from the Selimiye mosque [2, pp. 128–129]. The individual cases are told in Kanakaria mosaics, Lysi frescoes, Antiphonitis and Ayios Yeorgios, Kalo Chorio. None of these lists is a list of archaeological finds.

Antiquities appear in the local record in two places. The first is the Morphou shop in 1975, where the 217 objects and the 72 at the house were antiquities from a registered collection, and where the later sales of 1980 to 1982 were small lots of antiquities to tourists [1, pp. 150–151]. The second is the Ankara chests of 1981. Olay's English text calls all 158 objects "antiques", but every object it identifies is an icon, and both inventories they were matched against were inventories of church art [1, pp. 143–144]. The documented content of the chests is icons only, and they are not evidence that archaeological material left the north in bulk in 1981. Olay also reported, separately, illegal digging for tombs across the Famagusta district, run by "antique traders" with contacts in every region [1, p. 143], but it does not tie that digging to the men later named as the network's bosses.

So the local side handled church art first, as its main business, and antiquities where the evidence shows them: a looted registered collection in a dealer's shop, and small sales to tourists. The reasons for keeping the two trades apart in any count are set out in church art and antiquities.

How the local side ended

The network depended on the buyer in Munich. Dikmen's arrest there in October 1997 removed the store at the end of the chain, and the returns that followed are told in the Munich seizure of 1997. Dikmen died in 2020 (the date is given as 8 April or 5 May) and was never convicted of anything; his lawyer stated in 2010 that he had not been convicted at home or abroad [2, p. 127].

İlkman's name appears twice more in the Turkish Cypriot press. On 6 January 2006 the daily Kıbrıs reported a police seizure at his house under the headline "History gushed out of Tremeşeli's house" [6]. On 1 February 2008 Yeni Düzen included him in a list of "well-known names in the smuggling of antiquities" [7]. The English summaries do not say what was seized in 2006, and no prosecution is recorded after either report. He died in 2012. With both men gone, what remained was old stock and a scatter of small cases, set out in the decline after 1997. The organised removal of church art from the north, at its height in 1977 to 1982 (organised looting, 1977 to 1982), ended with the bosses who ran it.

Evidence against this account

Three points weigh against the picture of a network that dealt in church art and ended with its bosses.

• The hierarchy rests on one reconstruction. The org chart of an international boss, a local boss and named roles beneath them is Acar's, published in 1989 and quoted, not tested, in the assembly [3; 4]. It has not been rebutted, but no court heard it, and the 1982 series, written closer to the events, names no head of the network at all [1]. A reader should take the roles as one journalist's account, supported in its outline by Olay's description of a "MAFIA" [1, p. 150].
• The local trade did not stop in 1997. The police seizure at İlkman's house in 2006 and the 2008 press list show him still treated as active in the trade in his last years, as Hardy concludes [6; 7; 2, p. 129]. What ended with the bosses was the organised supply of church art to Munich; small dealing in the north went on, and cases continue to be reported.
• The network did handle antiquities. The Morphou shop held a looted registered collection, and the same series reports dealers behind tomb digging in the Famagusta district [1, pp. 143, 150]. The separation of church art from archaeology describes what the evidence mostly shows; it does not mean that no antiquities passed through the same hands.

The reply to each is the record itself. The church-art cases are many and well documented; the antiquities cases are few, local and small, and the largest of them, the Morphou shop, was found and recorded by the Turkish Cypriot authorities in 1975 [1, p. 150]. Meanwhile, in the Republic, registered antiquities went on leaving Cyprus lawfully under licence, under the rule that Karageorghis restated in Washington in January 1983 [9, p. 364], a channel described in licensed export, 1974 to 1996.

What the record means for an object on the market today

For an icon, a fresco fragment or a piece of church furniture of Cypriot origin, the network on this page is the main known route out of the north, and its route ran through Turkey to Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Such an object needs a history that is documented before 1974, and the Church of Cyprus and the Department of Antiquities in Nicosia are the places to ask.

For an archaeological object, the record of this network adds little. Its antiquities cases are a single registered collection marked "OHL" and small lots sold to tourists, and the identified contents of the 1981 chests were icons. A Cypriot pot or figurine of a northern type has its own record, and most such pieces left the island lawfully long before 1974, by the channels set out in northern types with lawful histories and legal export of Cypriot antiquities.