Register of Antiquities Bought by the Cyprus Museum, the Leventis Foundation and the Church

This register lists every purchase of antiquities by a Cypriot public body, or by a foundation buying for one, that we have found in print. It begins with two bronze sceptres entered in the Cyprus Museum inventory in 1935, the year the Antiquities Law created the Department of Antiquities, and ends with the payments made by the Church of Cyprus in 2024. Each entry gives the date, what was bought, the buyer, the seller or venue as the source names them, the price where one was published, the Cyprus Museum inventory number where one is known, where the object was said to have come from, the reason the buyer gave, and the source.

The history behind these entries, and the buyers' reasons set out in full, is in the state as buyer.

The register

Open an entry to see its inventory number, stated origin, stated reason and source. The filters combine: choose a buyer, then a decade on the bar chart, to see, for example, what the Cyprus Museum bought in the 1960s. The CSV download contains the entries currently shown.

What the register counts

An entry is one purchase as the source reports it. Some entries are a single object, such as the White Painted IV jug with a warrior bought on the London market for the Cyprus Museum in 1981; others are a lot, a hoard or a year's buying described in one sentence, such as the "considerable number of objects circulating on the market" that the Museum bought in 1973 with a donation from Anastasios Leventis. The number of objects is given where the source gives one. The count of entries is therefore a count of recorded transactions, not of objects, and it is a floor: the yearly reports printed lists of acquisitions in which many objects appear without any statement of how they were acquired, and those are left out.

Four kinds of acquisition are excluded: gifts for which nothing was paid, objects seized by the police or customs, objects returned by court order, and finds from excavation. An entry is included only where the source says, in words, that the object was bought. Payments made to recover an object, whether exported, stolen or looted, are included and marked "bought back", because they are purchases on the market; objects returned against a fee for costs are marked "returned against costs". A purchase that was planned but is not known to have taken place is left out.

Buyers and periods

The Bank of Cyprus entry is one standing policy, recorded from the 1960s, of buying coins "from authorised dealers". The Cyprus Museum's own buying is concentrated before the invasion. Of its 66 purchases up to July 1974, the sources name an antiquities dealer as the seller in 17, the Famagusta chemist and collector George Basil Palma or his daughter in 13 [1], another private collector or private person in 8, the finder in 5, a village or "the local market" in 4, and sellers inside the Turkish Cypriot enclaves in 1; in 18 they do not name the seller. The report for 1959 says of one group of Iron Age vases that they had all been "bought from antiquities dealers, so their provenance is not certain" [2].

After August 1974 the Department appears as a buyer only twice in print. Purchases for the Cyprus Museum were made by the Leventis Foundation instead, on the London and Swiss markets, and the Foundation gave the objects to the Museum. In the Foundation's own catalogue of 1990 these purchases are listed under the heading of repatriation [4], and the register gives that heading as the stated reason. The Church's payments from 1997 onwards are mostly for church art taken from the occupied north; the objects it recovered from Munich in 2024 also included prehistoric antiquities.

How to read an inventory number

The Cyprus Museum registers an object under the date it was entered: the year, the month in Roman numerals and the day, followed by a running number for that day. The objects from the Hadjiprodromou collection that the Leventis Foundation bought in 1981 were entered under fifteen numbers, 1981/V-4/1 to 15, that is, on 4 May 1981 [4]. The number dates the purchase, or the registration that followed it, and it is the number to ask for when writing to the Museum about an object. Inventory numbers are given for 56 of the 99 entries. Where a printed number could not be read with certainty it is left out rather than guessed.

Sources and prices

Most entries for 1935 to 1985 come from three sources: Merrillees's study of the Palma purchases [1]; the reports on "Archaeology in Cyprus" by A. H. S. Megaw, Director of Antiquities, in the Journal of Hellenic Studies and Archaeological Reports for the early 1950s; and, from the year 1958, the yearly "Chronique des fouilles et découvertes archéologiques à Chypre" in the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique, written by Vassos Karageorghis, later Director of the Department. The Leventis Foundation purchases come from the Foundation's catalogues and reports [4]. The purchases across the line from the enclaves between 1970 and 1974, paid by "a government cheque from the Central Bank", come from Karageorghis's memoirs [3]. The Church's payments of 1997 come from the timeline of the Munich case published by Archaeology in 1998 [6], and the later payments from the press. Quotations from the French reports are given in English.

Prices are rare. The Department's reports did not print what it paid, and the Leventis Foundation's catalogues did not either. A sum is printed for five entries. Four are the Church's payments for church art; the fifth, and the only published figure for antiquities, is "over £8,000" for two objects bought in a London shop in about 1991, which Karageorghis gave in a paper on the London trade [5]. For what Cypriot antiquities sell for on the open market, see the economics of looting.

Corrections and additions

The register is kept up to date as further reports are read. The Department's own annual reports, which list purchases year by year, would add many entries for the 1950s to the 1990s. If you know of a published purchase that is missing, or an entry that is wrong, please contact us with the source.