Petros Kolokasides: A Licensed Dealer in Nicosia

Petros Kolokasides was one of the dealers in Nicosia who held a licence from the Department of Antiquities under the Antiquities Law of 1935, and he is the dealer whose name turns up most often in the histories of Cypriot objects sold on the island between the Second World War and the 1970s. He bought from villagers, finders and older collections, sold to residents, visiting scholars, tourists and museums, and had his customers' purchases inspected and licensed for export. Everything he sold through that channel left Cyprus lawfully. Very little of it came with a find-spot, and some of it came from tombs dug without a permit. This page sets out what the record shows of his trade, in the order it shows it, as the lawful counterpart of the illicit networks described elsewhere in this part of the section. His life and the documents he left in private hands are told in the article on Kolokasides; the system he worked in is described in licensed dealers and registered collections. The Iron Age Bichrome tripod bowl at the head of this page, in the Drakopoulos collection, is of the class of painted pottery that passed through his shop; it is not a piece recorded as his.

The licence and what it allowed

The Antiquities Law of 1935 made dealing in antiquities a licensed trade. A dealer held a licence from the Director, filed returns of what he bought and sold, and could sell an object abroad only once the Department had inspected it and issued an export licence; the law itself is described in the 1905 and 1935 laws. A. H. S. Megaw, who arrived as Director in 1936, used the licence to steer buyers towards named shops. He placed notices in the hotels used by foreign visitors: "Visitors are urgently requested to purchase antiquities only from dealers displaying a license from the Department of Antiquities ... To neglect this precaution is directly to encourage illegal excavation" [1, p. 46]. When tourists complained of the journey from Famagusta to Nicosia for their export licences, he began "to regularly check the stock of licensed traders to identify and approve artefacts for sale and export", believing it "in the interests of the Department to stimulate the trade in antiquities through the authorised channels" [1, p. 46].

Powell, the biographer of the Australian archaeologists Jim and Eve Stewart, writes: "One of the three people who Megaw licensed as an approved antiquities dealer was Petro Colocassides. Eve would come to know him well" [1, pp. 46–47]. The figure of three is Powell's. The record names other licensed dealers in the same period, among them George Basil Palma in Famagusta, whose monthly returns and export consignments survive in the State Archives, and Merrillees, writing on Palma, was told that Epaminondas Skeparnides of Trikomo "was a colleague of Peter Colocassides and a gambler" [10, p. 408]. The working of a dealer's licence, as Palma's file records it, is set out on the licensed-dealers page.

Dealer and collector: the notice of 1965

The most authoritative description of him is a single paragraph by Vassos Karageorghis, who as Director of Antiquities published his Mycenaean vases in 1965 in the first Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum volume of private collections in Cyprus, beside the collections of the Pierides family and other Nicosia and Larnaca owners: "Mr. Petros Kolokassides is a licenced dealer in Antiquities in Nicosia, and at the same time a collector. His Mycenaean vases were acquired from various sources throughout the island. Most of the vases of this collection are of ordinary types, except a Mycenaean II cup, which is one of the earliest imported Mycenaean (or Minoan) vases found in Cyprus" [2, p. 8].

Two points in that paragraph matter for anyone reading a provenance line today. The first is that he kept a collection of his own, separate from his stock and numbered: a jug now in the Pancyprian Gymnasium in Nicosia is catalogued as "no. 220: (ex-Kolokasides Collection no. 425)" [5]. The second is the phrase "from various sources throughout the island". Karageorghis said as much of all six collections in the volume: "It is unfortunate that the exact provenance of the vases described here is not known, but we may say for certain that they were all found in Cyprus" [2, p. 7].

His collection was still being published eight years later. In his chronicle of discoveries for 1973, Karageorghis described a Base Ring II figure of a horse with the legs of its rider, under the heading "Collection Kolokassides, Nicosie", as one of the rare representations of horse and rider in the Late Bronze Age [7].

What the record shows he sold, 1947 to 1986

The documented sales begin with coins. In 1947 Jim Stewart visited the village of Stavrokono in Paphos district with him in pursuit of a coin hoard [1, p. 263], and Stewart sent Eve to him to track down coins, writing that "the 'Mission Colocasides [sic]' really is important" [1, p. 110]. In 1960 Stewart introduced the numismatist Christopher Blunt to him as "my general agent for antiquities in Cyprus and the best of the coin dealers", adding that "he is perfectly reasonable about prices, or at any rate used to be" [1, p. 209].

On 6 November 1953 the Department issued export licence No. 2655 for a consignment of jugs, bowls, lamps and a small head bought from him four days earlier, for twenty-three pounds in all [11]. The licence and the receipt are reproduced in the Kolokasides article, which also shows that the licence carries his name and signature rather than the buyer's.

On 8 December 1959 Stewart bought from "the Nicosia dealer Petros Colocassides" nine metal objects, seven pots and a pottery lid, part of a larger group of 26 objects (13 metal, 11 ceramic and two stone) offered for sale at the time [3, pp. 261, 263]. The Cyprus Museum bought from the same group, including a copper ring-ingot which Karageorghis published in his chronicle for 1959 [3, p. 275]. The objects belong to the Philia facies of about 2400 to 2300 BC; a chisel in the group is stamped with a linear sign. Ten of Stewart's pieces are now in the Museum of Antiquities of the University of New England at Armidale, which acquired them through Eve Stewart in 1974 and 1978 [3, p. 261]. The same sale is listed among the state's purchases in the purchases register and discussed in the state as buyer.

In the 1960s Jean Des Gagniers, then excavating at Soloi for Université Laval in Québec, formed the university's Cypriot collection of more than four hundred objects, mostly Cypro-Archaic pottery, from two sources: the Department of Antiquities itself and "a Nicosia antiquities dealer, P. Kolokassides". In the words of the review of Michel Fortin's catalogue of 1996, "the objects acquired from Kolokassides were exported from Cyprus with the permission of the Department of Antiquities" [4, p. 185].

Private buyers took his objects to Britain. A Cypro-Geometric Bichrome bowl offered for sale by a gallery in 2016 came from the collection of the botanist Oleg Polunin (1914–1985), "acquired during the 1950s–1960s from P. Kolokasides, Cyprus", with its "Cyprus Museum lead export tag attached to the handle" and "an old typed card with attached photo stating acquisition details and attribution". The Department of Antiquities checked the history against its own archive and confirmed it [6, p. 38]. A Cypro-Geometric Bichrome jug sold by another gallery was "purchased in Cyprus from the licensed dealer P. Kolokasides and exported under permit by the Cypriot Department of Antiquities in 1975", with a photocopy of the export licence [8]. That licence dates from after the Turkish invasion, and it shows the licensed channel running on in the south under the policy described in licensed export, 1974 to 1996.

The last documented purchase is a public one. In 1986 the newly founded Association of Friends of the Leventis Municipal Museum of Nicosia made its "first step" a visit to "the art dealer and collector Petros Colocassides to discuss the possibility of purchasing some medieval ceramics from him". With help from members and a small loan, the secretary of the association agreed to pay in four instalments, and the museum acquired its first twenty-six medieval glazed vessels in the summer of 1986; they are on display in its Frankish Gallery [9, p. 21]. These are medieval ceramics, not church art and not ancient material, and the museum's account of the purchase is its own.

Where a licensed dealer's stock came from

The licence made the sale lawful; it did not make the digging lawful, and the record of this dealer shows both. His stock came, in Karageorghis's phrase, "from various sources throughout the island" [2, p. 8], which in practice meant finders, villagers and older collections, and some of it came from tombs opened without a permit. The clearest case is his own sale of 1959: he "did not disclose the provenance of this material", but Stewart was convinced that the metal objects formed one deposit from "a looted tomb at Vasilia on the north coast", and Webb and her co-authors add that "the Vasilia tombs ... were being looted at this time" [3, p. 263]. Megaw's own notice assumed that unlicensed supply existed [1, p. 46], and the licensed shops were one of the places it surfaced. A later Director of Antiquities, Sophocles Hadjisavvas, went further about the island's collections formed before 1974, saying they were "illegal in the sense that they all came from illicit excavations", and S. A. Hardy, quoting him, adds that "more than 1250 people had become collectors" in those years, a figure Hardy takes from Hadjisavvas (2001, p. 135) [12, p. 462]. Hardy's argument concerns the collecting of 1963 to 1973, and the policy he calls clandestine was described in print by Karageorghis in Antiquity in 1976 [13, pp. 233–234]; the 1973 measure was a declaration window under the 1935 law, not an amnesty. Kolokasides was licensed decades before that decade began, and his sales went through the Department's inspection. None of this turns an object he sold into a documented excavation, and none of it makes its export unlawful.

How his objects are recognised in provenance lines

His name is spelled in at least five ways, because every cataloguer transliterated the Greek Κολοκασίδης afresh. Karageorghis wrote Kolokassides in 1965 and 1974 [2, p. 8; 7], as did the review of the Laval catalogue [4, p. 185]. Bikai wrote Kolokasides, and so did the gallery history that Alphas, of the Department of Antiquities, quotes [5; 6, p. 38]. Webb and her co-authors, the Leventis Municipal Museum and Powell wrote Colocassides [3, p. 261; 9, p. 21; 1, p. 47]. Stewart himself wrote Colocasides, which Powell marks sic [1, p. 110]. The forename appears as Petros, Petro, Peter or a bare P., and Merrillees's informant called him Peter Colocassides [10, p. 408]. A search of a museum database or an export archive under one spelling will miss most of his objects.

His objects reach the market with one or more of four kinds of paper. A receipt or typed card from the dealer, sometimes with a photograph or sketch and his stock number, is the dealer's side of the sale. A numbered export licence from the Department of Antiquities is the state's side; the form tied the licence to objects the Department had examined and sealed, as described in lawful and illicit in the record. A small lead seal stamped C.M., wired to a handle, is the physical mark of that inspection. A number in his own collection, as on the Pancyprian Gymnasium jug, marks a piece he kept rather than sold at once. How to read each of them is set out in the article on export licences and labels.

Why a Kolokasides history is a lawful one

A Kolokasides history describes a sale on the island by a dealer the state licensed, followed by an export the state inspected and permitted. The state was his regulator, his customer and, through the Cyprus Museum saleroom, his competitor for the same visitors; it bought from him in 1959, published his collection in 1965 and 1974, licensed exports of his stock into 1975, and a municipal museum bought from him in 1986. Université Laval's account of its purchases from him states that they "were exported from Cyprus with the permission of the Department of Antiquities" [4, p. 185]. Where the Department has been asked to confirm a Kolokasides history from its own files, as with the Polunin bowl, it has done so [6, p. 38].

The licence system also left a limitation. A licence issued in the dealer's name for a client's purchase, with the objects described only by type, is genuine but hard to match to one pot, and the buyer's name may survive only on the dealer's receipt. That is a gap in identification, not a doubt about legality, and the way to close it is set out in documenting a lawful history. Objects of northern types that left through his shop, such as the Philia material of 1959 attributed to Vasilia, left fifteen years before the invasion; they belong with the northern types with lawful histories, not with the losses after 1974.

What this means for an object on the market today

An object whose history names Kolokasides in any of his spellings, with a receipt, a typed card, a C.M. lead seal or a numbered export licence, left Cyprus through the lawful channel of the 1935 law, and the Department of Antiquities in Nicosia can check a licence against its archive. A search there may need to be made under the dealer's name rather than the buyer's, and under each spelling. The same history will almost never say where the object was found: his stock came "from various sources throughout the island" [2, p. 8], and in the one sale examined closely by archaeologists, that of 1959, the likely source was a tomb being looted at the time. A Kolokasides history is evidence of lawful title and export, which is what the market and the law ask for, and it is no evidence of lawful excavation. A claimed Kolokasides history with no paper at all is a family recollection, worth recording and worth checking, but it is not yet a provenance.