Michel van Rijn and the Recovery of Church Art from Cyprus

Michel van Rijn was a Dutch art dealer who appears twice in the record of church art taken from the occupied north of Cyprus after the Turkish invasion of 1974, on opposite sides. In July 1988 he was one of the intermediaries who sold four fragments of the Kanakaria apse mosaic to an Indianapolis dealer in the free port of Geneva airport, and the American courts that ordered the fragments returned set out what he was paid. In 1997 he was the intermediary through whom the Church of Cyprus bought back a Kanakaria medallion and 32 frescoes from Antiphonitis, and he helped set up the Munich police operation in which Aydın Dikmen, the dealer who had sold him the mosaics nine years earlier, was arrested; Dikmen was never convicted of anything. Van Rijn himself was never charged with any offence concerning Cyprus. What he handled, on the record, was church art: no archaeological object from Cyprus is attributed to him in the court records or the reports of the recoveries. He died in Italy in July 2024, aged 73 [7]. This page follows his part across the cases in order and links each case for the full account. The photograph above shows the coastal flat at Lambousa below the Kyrenia range, in the occupied north, with the Acheiropoietos monastery in the middle distance; icons from the churches of the district were among those removed after 1974, though none is linked to van Rijn (photo: Chris06, cropped and resized, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

An icon dealer with a French conviction

The court record describes van Rijn as he was in 1988. The Seventh Circuit called him "a Dutch art dealer" and "a published expert on Christian icons", noting that the buyer had been given a copy of his book, and recorded that she knew he "had been convicted by a French court for art forgery" and that "he claimed to be a descendant of both Rembrandt and Rubens" [1]. Anne Sullivan, writing in 1991, gives the conviction: "In 1985 he was convicted in absentia by a French court for forging the signature of Marc Chagall on some lithographs" [3, p. 235]. The district court counted the buyer's knowledge of that conviction among the circumstances that should have made her suspicious [2].

The press told a larger story, much of it his own. The Dutch daily Trouw, in its obituary, said that he grew up in Amsterdam in a well-off family with art on the walls, and that by his own account he moved into the illegal art trade in the Soviet Union, where, as he told the Belgian paper De Morgen in 2006, "every believing Russian had an icon collection" [8]. Het Parool called him "known as an art smuggler" who "earned a lot of money" from it [7]. Trouw added a warning that applies to every story he told: he "dealt wholesale in tall stories", and whether all of it was true "is open to doubt" [8]. This page uses his own accounts only where they are attributed to him, and uses the court records and the Church's figures for everything else.

The Kanakaria sale of 1988

The four fragments sold in 1988, the figure of Christ, the north archangel and the medallions of St James and St Matthew, had been cut from the apse of the Panagia Kanakaria at Lythrankomi between 1976 and 1979; the case is told in full in the Kanakaria mosaics. Van Rijn's part, as the Seventh Circuit summarised the trial record, was as follows [1]:

• 1 July 1988, Amsterdam. An Indianapolis dealer introduced the buyer, Peg Goldberg, to van Rijn and to a California lawyer, who was in Europe "to represent" the Indianapolis dealer and van Rijn. Van Rijn showed her photographs of the four mosaics and "told her that the seller wanted $3 million for them" [1].
• The seller's story. Van Rijn told her that the seller was a Turkish antiquities dealer who had "found" the mosaics in the rubble of an "extinct" church in northern Cyprus [1]. Sullivan adds that he described the seller as "the former 'official archaeologist' for Turkish Cyprus", who had found them in a church "being used as a pen for livestock" [3, p. 236]. The courts found instead that the mosaics had been removed from the church without the owner's authority [2].
• The contract with the seller. The lawyer went to Munich and came back "with a contract he signed as agent for van Rijn to purchase the mosaics from Dikman for $350,000". The buyer "was not told of this contract" [1].
• The resale agreement. On 3 July the buyer, van Rijn, the Indianapolis dealer and the lawyer agreed to "acquire the mosaics for their purchase price of $1,080,000 (U.S.)" and to split any resale profit 50 per cent to the buyer, 22.5 per cent each to the two dealers and 5 per cent to the lawyer [1].

On 7 July 1988, in the Geneva free port, the buyer handed over $1,080,000 in $100 bills. The court record divides it: "$350,000 to Dikman (as per [the lawyer's] and van Rijn's prior agreement with him); $282,500 to van Rijn; $297,500 to [the Indianapolis dealer]; $80,000 to [the lawyer]; and $70,000 to another attorney in London" [1]. Afterwards two Indiana investors, the Seventh Circuit says, "acquired from van Rijn and [the Indianapolis dealer] substantial interests in the profits from any resale of the mosaics" for "large sums of money" [1]. According to the district court, they paid $780,000 for half of each dealer's resale share, and the Indianapolis dealer testified that he received $375,000 of it [2]. The court did not state van Rijn's half.

On the stated figures alone, van Rijn's commission in Geneva was smaller than Dikmen's price. Counted with the sale of half his resale interest, as most accounts count it, he took about $657,500 from the sale, nearly twice what Dikmen received; if he had the whole of the $780,000 beyond the other dealer's $375,000, his total was about $687,500. Either way the intermediaries, not the holder, made most of the money, and whoever cut the mosaic from the wall does not appear in the record at all. The comparison with ordinary Cypriot antiquities is made in the economics of looting.

Van Rijn was not a party to the lawsuit, and no court made a finding against him. The case was a replevin action against the buyer, which the Church of Cyprus and the Republic won in August 1989 and on appeal in October 1990 [2; 1]. The four fragments were returned to Cyprus in 1991.

Changing sides, 1988 to 1997

Van Rijn dated his change of side to the Kanakaria case. "I joined the other side in 1988," he told The Irish Times in January 1998 [6]. The paper reported that from that time until March 1997 he had "covert contacts" with the Cypriot honorary consul in The Hague, who led the Church's work on stolen church art, "providing her with information which led to the return or location of a number of important pieces" [6]. The paper did not list the pieces, and no published source does.

The date rests on his word. He sold the Kanakaria fragments in July 1988, and the only witness to a change of side later that year is van Rijn himself; the consul's contacts with him are reported, but not the date they began.

The buy-back and the Munich operation of 1997

The best-documented part of his recovery work is the operation of 1997, which Mark Rose set out in Archaeology in April 1998 [4]. The full account of the raids, the German civil case and the returns of 2013 to 2024 is in the Munich seizure of 1997; the frescoes are described in Antiphonitis.

• February 1997. Van Rijn approached the honorary consul and offered to help recover three mosaics and 44 frescoes. In return he asked "for protection for himself and his family as well as a license to operate a casino in Cyprus". Rose adds that his decision "effectively ended his career as an art dealer". With the approval of the Church and the Attorney General, the consul "raises the equivalent of about $500,000 from the Cypriot church to fund the operation" [4].
• 5 September 1997. Van Rijn brought the Kanakaria medallion of St Thaddeus to the Cypriot consulate in The Hague "and is paid a first installment" [4].
• 6 and 7 September 1997. He went to Munich and bought 25 frescoes from Dikmen through intermediaries "using $75,000 of his own money"; back in The Hague he "receives $168,000, of which $98,000 are expenses". The next day he arranged the purchase of "seven larger frescoes for $49,000" [4].
• October 1997. Having recovered 32 frescoes and one mosaic, the consul decided to move against Dikmen. "Van Rijn and his intermediaries are granted immunity in the Netherlands, Cyprus, and Germany", and a sting was set up [4]. Van Rijn travelled to Munich with the consul and two Interpol officers, and on 9 and 10 October the police arrested Dikmen during an exchange and raided two flats, where they found icons, Antiphonitis frescoes and the Kanakaria medallion of St Thomas [4].
• 22 December 1997. The 32 frescoes and the St Thaddeus medallion, after an exhibition in The Hague, were returned to Cyprus [4].

The Munich seizure was the largest recovery of church art from the occupied north, and the 1997 buy-back was the step that led to it. Van Rijn's part in it is recorded by the Church's own side and was rewarded by immunity in three countries [4]. Rose reported that he had "received death threats as a result of his cooperation with authorities" and was under the protection of Scotland Yard [4].

What the Church paid him

Rose's timeline is the only published record of the payments. It gives one figure: $168,000 on 6 September 1997, of which $98,000 was described as expenses, against $75,000 of his own money spent on 25 frescoes [4]. The first instalment for the St Thaddeus medallion is not given, nor is the source of the $49,000 for the seven larger frescoes. The whole operation was funded with about $500,000 raised from the Church [4]. On those figures van Rijn received $70,000 above his stated expenses for one batch; Rose does not say how the rest of the fund was spent. The Church's payments are set beside the Republic's own purchases in the state as buyer.

The objects bought in September 1997 were church art: frescoes cut from the walls of Antiphonitis and a medallion from the Kanakaria apse. The Munich stock seized afterwards also held archaeological material, and 36 of the 60 objects in the final return of 2024 were "prehistoric and other antiquities" (see the Munich seizure of 1997). None of that material is tied to van Rijn in the published record.

His own account: books, website and interviews

Van Rijn wrote about himself at length. Hot Art, Cold Cash (1993) was, in Het Parool's description, a book "about his work as a smuggler"; he later wrote thrillers set in the art trade [7; 10]. In the 1990s and 2000s he ran a website on the illicit art trade, on which he described himself as "the self-styled inkslinger investigating and reporting on the global illicit art trade"; he closed it in October 2006, saying he had done so "not because of legal troubles, but because of a not-very-veiled threat to his children" [9].

His accounts are a source on the Cypriot trade, and they are used as one. Derek Fincham draws on him for the methods of Dikmen's team, who would, in van Rijn's words, "cover the delicate frescoes with gauze and plaster which would be backed with stiff material, cut them into sections", and lay each section in a shallow box "like a slice of dried salt fish in a souk" [5, p. 305]. Fincham marks the account as an allegation, and so does this section: the description of how frescoes were cut is consistent with the damage recorded in the churches, but the details of who did what rest on van Rijn. The characterisation of Dikmen as an "official archaeologist" was van Rijn's sales line in 1988 [3, p. 236], and it should be read as that.

He had reasons to tell his story in a particular way. He was an informant who had been paid, had been given immunity, and had asked the Church for a casino licence [4]. He also told stories about other people, many of them living, and most of those cannot be checked; none is repeated here. His accounts are therefore used here for what he did himself, where other sources agree, and not as evidence against anyone else.

The evidence against crediting him with the recoveries

Four points cut against reading van Rijn as a man who changed sides and brought Cypriot church art home.

• He profited from the sale before he profited from the recovery. On the court's figures he took $282,500 in Geneva for arranging the sale of the Kanakaria fragments, and sold part of his resale interest for a sum the court did not state [1; 2]. The same mosaic later earned him money again, when the Church paid for the St Thaddeus medallion [4].
• The Church's money went to the trade. In 1997 the Church paid $168,000 for one batch of 25 frescoes, of which $70,000 was above the stated expenses [4]. Samuel Hardy argues that buying back stolen cultural property pays the people who hold it, and that where the objects are unique and documented, as church frescoes are, a buyer of last resort gives thieves a reason to steal [11]. On the 1997 payments the record supports him. His critique, and the reply to it for archaeological material, are set out in buying back.
• His testimony was not given. In January 1998 he said of Dikmen, "I am going to testify against him in court" [6]. He did not. Fincham records that Dikmen was not convicted "because Michel van Rijn refused to testify at trial, though he had cooperated with police during the investigation, on the grounds that he was receiving death threats" [5, p. 310]. The German criminal case was also reported as time-barred (see the Munich seizure of 1997), so his silence was not the only reason, but the trial that would have tested the network's history never took place.
• His change of side rests on his own word. The date of 1988 is his [6], and it falls in the same year as the Geneva sale.

Against those, the recoveries were real. The St Thaddeus medallion and the 32 Antiphonitis frescoes came back to Cyprus in December 1997 because he bought them and delivered them [4], and the operation he helped to set up led to the seizure from which 267 objects were returned through the German courts and the final agreement. Other church art from the north came home by other routes without him, among them the four Antiphonitis icons returned by the Netherlands government in 2013 under a statute, with no intermediary paid (see the Dutch icons).

Death, and what his record means for an object today

Van Rijn died in Italy in late July 2024, aged 73; his former publisher announced the death [7], and the date is given as 25 July [12]. Trouw summed up the change in his career: hunted for years by the police, he later worked with them to trace art [8]. Nothing in his record touches the ordinary trade in Cypriot antiquities. He handled icons, frescoes and mosaics, unique objects from named churches, published and photographed before 1974, which could be identified when they surfaced; that is why they could be recovered, and why they fetched sums that Bronze Age pottery never does.

For a buyer today, his name in the history of an icon or fresco from Cyprus calls for a check against the Church's claims; it does not establish a lawful history. An object that passed through his hands between the 1970s and 1997 may have come from Dikmen's Munich stock, and the claims of the Church of Cyprus to such material have succeeded in the courts of the United States and Germany (see the Kanakaria mosaics and the decline after 1997). For a Cypriot pot, figurine or limestone head, his name does not occur in the record, and the history of such an object is checked through the lawful channels set out in looting in occupied northern Cyprus and the rest of this section.