The State as Buyer: How the Cyprus Museum, Its Partners and the Church Bought Cypriot Antiquities

In the yearly report for 1959, the Cyprus Museum published a group of Iron Age vases with a plain note on where they had come from: they "ont tous été achetés à des antiquaires et dont la provenance n'est donc pas assurée", all bought from antiquities dealers, so their findspots were not secure [2]. Notes of that kind run through the Museum's own reports for forty years. From the Antiquities Law of 1935 to the Turkish invasion of 1974 the Cyprus Museum bought antiquities every year from licensed dealers, private collectors and finders. After 1974 the buying moved abroad and private money paid for it: the A. G. Leventis Foundation bought Cypriot antiquities on the London and Swiss markets, at the Director of Antiquities' request, and gave them to the Museum. Municipal museums and a bank bought on the island, and the Church of Cyprus paid for church art taken from the occupied north. This entry sets out that record in order, with each buyer's reason in the buyer's own words. The item-level detail (date, object, seller, inventory number and source) is in the purchases register, the companion page to this one. The record bears on two points: the market in Cypriot antiquities was a lawful one that the state itself used, and the state repeatedly chose to recover objects by paying for them. A later section sets out the strongest case against that policy.

The Cyprus Museum as a buyer, 1935 to 1963

The law expected the Museum to buy. Under the Antiquities Law of 1935, undiscovered antiquities belonged to the Government and a finder had to report them, but if the Director decided to keep a find for the Cyprus Museum or a district museum, "he shall pay to the finder such sum as appears to him to be the fair market value for the same" (s. 5(1)) [1]. Payment to finders was the statute working as written. Alongside it, the Museum bought from the island's licensed dealers and from collectors, as any museum of the period did.

The longest documented run of purchases is from one Famagusta family. Robert Merrillees has reconstructed it from the Museum's inventory and the Department's files. George Basil Palma, a chemist and collector, sold objects to the Museum from 1935 until his death in 1952. Afterwards his daughter Kinga "progressively sold" much of what remained: in 1953 more than thirty Greek and Roman coins and a ring bezel (CM 1953/II-5/1 to 34), then two ring-stones set in silver; in 1954 "approximately 78 small items of jewellery, mostly earrings and beads, nearly all of them gold (CM 1954/I-23/1), again without provenance"; and finally the gold pomegranate pendant CM 1954/III-24/1, "purchased from the collection of the late George Palma of Famagusta" [3]. In the same years the Museum bought a silver ring from the Palma collection through "the antiquities dealer Petros Colocassides", and four gold beads, also ex-Palma, from the Baroness von Bissing, who had bought them from Palma in 1937 [3]. None of these objects had a findspot. The Museum bought them anyway, recorded them, and put them on its registers.

From 1958 the Department's yearly report in the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique, written by Vassos Karageorghis, carries a section on acquisitions, and nearly every year some of them are "achetés", most often "à un antiquaire". Our register records 68 purchases between 1935 and 1974. Where the seller is stated, it is an antiquities dealer in 17 rows, the Palma family in 13, another collector or private person in 9, villagers or finders in 6, and the Turkish Cypriot enclaves in one; 20 rows do not state the seller. No price for any of these purchases has been published. The same Museum also sold antiquities to the public through its own saleroom, a story told in how the Cyprus Museum sold antiquities; and one of the few dealers named as a seller to the Museum, the licensed Nicosia dealer Kolokasides, also sold to foreign buyers who exported under licence.

Buying as rescue, 1964 to 1974

After the intercommunal fighting of 1963–64, large areas of the island were outside the Republic's control, and the yearly reports begin to give a reason for buying. In 1965 villagers near Kouklia (Palaepaphos) opened a warrior tomb at Mavrommatis. Karageorghis wrote that the tomb "a été ouverte clandestinement par les habitants du village sur lequel aucun contrôle ne peut être exercé en ce moment à cause de la situation politique. Nous avons récupéré un grand nombre des objets" [4]. The Department bought the tomb group and then excavated the robbed tomb. In the excavation report the Museum's purchases are listed under a heading that states their origin: "Objets achetés par le Musée, provenant de fouilles illicites", with the inventory numbers 1965/XI-29/1 onwards [5]. In 1969 three Red Polished vases "provenant de fouilles illicites, mais qui ont pu être récupérés et achetés par le Musée de Chypre" were bought [6]. The report for 1970 states the policy in a sentence: "Le Service des Antiquités, dans l'impossibilité d'agir différemment, a essayé de récupérer quelques objets en les achetant indirectement" [7].

The Director also bought in person across the line. In his memoir of 2007, as quoted by Samuel Hardy, Karageorghis wrote that between 1970 and 1974, "under the pretext of supervising the work of the UNESCO experts at St. Sophia", he often crossed the "border" into the Turkish Cypriot sector of Nicosia in the car of the UNESCO conservator Carlo Musso: "I bought for the Cyprus Museum a good number of important objects.... I did not pay cash… I would bring them a government cheque from the Central Bank" [8, pp. 102–103]. No itemised list of those purchases has been published.

Private money began to pay for state purchases before 1974. The report for 1973 records that "un nombre considérable d'objets qui circulaient sur le marché ont pu être acquis par le Musée de Chypre, grâce à une généreuse donation de son Excellence l'Ambassadeur de Chypre auprès de l'Unesco, M. A. Leventis" [9]. The buying ran to the month of the invasion: a large group of Proto-White Painted and White Painted vases, inventoried up to July 1974, "ont été achetés par l'intermédiaire d'un antiquaire en trois lots" [10].

Most of the material dug in the enclaves in these years was bought by private collectors, not by the Museum, under the policy that Karageorghis called the "silent accord" (set out in lawful and illicit in the record). In the Severis catalogue he described it as "allowing Cypriots who had access to the Turkish enclaves to buy the 'spoils' of looting so that these should remain in the country and not be exported abroad". Other buyers had no such reason: "there were others who were then buying from the looters (foreign diplomats, members of foreign missions and others), who enjoyed immunity" [11, pp. 17–18]. The collectors were asked to declare their holdings in the second half of 1973. One of them, Dhimitrios Z. Pierides of Larnaca, "in consultation with the Department of Antiquities, bought a large number of antiquities, thus saving them for the country", and also bought Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age pieces "on the foreign markets after they had been illicitly exported from Cyprus" [12, p. 18]. That collection became the Pierides Foundation Museum in 1974 (see the Pierides family collection).

After 1974: the Leventis Foundation buys for the Cyprus Museum

The first purchase abroad after the invasion set the pattern. A Late Bronze Age bronze wheeled stand "was found by looters in 1972 in a Turkish village in the Famagusta District", and the Department "tried unsuccessfully at that time to acquire it". After 1974 it was exported and offered to the British Museum and the Louvre, "but both museums refused to purchase it and informed the Department of Antiquities of its whereabouts". It was traced to a dealer at Drei Eichen near Frankfurt and "purchased with a grant from the Cyprus Government and Mr A. G. Leventis in 1978" (Cyprus Museum 1978/XI-21/1) [13, pp. 10, 67]. Karageorghis recalled that "the sum demanded by the dealer was well in excess of our budget"; he asked Leventis's assistant to mention the problem, and the money came with the words "Give them what they need in order to save the cultural heritage of Cyprus" [13, p. 10]. No price was published.

Anastasios Leventis died in 1978, and the Foundation's Cypriot branch was established in 1980 with the Director of Antiquities on its board. The Foundation's own report credits Karageorghis, "when Director of the Department of Antiquities and as a member of the board", as "the instigator and guide of the work itself" [13, p. 13]. The buyer of record was private; the Director chose what to buy. The stated rule was narrow: "Only items which could not be identified as belonging to a specific museum or collection have been purchased abroad; in the case of objects with a known provenance, the Cyprus Government has always collaborated with Interpol and other official channels to obtain their return" [13, p. 11].

The Department's yearly reports record the purchases as they happened. For 1980: "Grâce à de généreuses donations, il a été possible de rapatrier quelques objets chypriotes anciens qui avaient été exportés illégalement de la zone Nord de Chypre" [14]. For 1982, a terracotta group was "acheté chez un antiquaire de Londres par la Fondation Leventis pour le Musée de Chypre" [15]. The Foundation's catalogue of 1990 lists 44 objects in 30 entries bought between 1978 and 1989; of the dealer purchases, all but one were made on the London market and one on the Swiss market, and no dealer is named [13, pp. 53–80].

The largest single purchase was from a Cypriot owner. The Hadjiprodromou collection, declared to the Department in 1973, was looted from the owner's house in occupied Famagusta after the invasion. Pieces that surfaced abroad were claimed by the owner or offered by middlemen, and "those objects restored by one means or another to their legal owner were finally bought by the Foundation from the collector and were presented to the Cyprus Museum" [13, p. 54]. The Department's report put it the same way: the objects had been "rapatriés et rendus à leur propriétaire, pour être finalement rachetés par la Fondation Leventis et offerts au Musée de Chypre" [16]. The group was registered in May 1981.

Karageorghis described the arrangement in the first volume of the International Journal of Cultural Property: the Foundation "from the Turkish invasion in 1974 to the present day, buys Cypriot antiquities which cannot be acquired except by purchase from antiquities dealers". Some months before he wrote, it had bought a sixth-century fish jug and a Red Polished terracotta spoon from a London shop: "For these two pieces the Foundation paid a sum of over £8,000". This is the only price published for any of the Foundation's purchases [17, p. 2]. The buying continued into the next decade. The Foundation's report for 1999 to 2008 illustrates further "repatriated" objects, among them a terracotta deer (2002/I-25/4), under the line "More items have since come to light, purchased from dealers by the Foundation" [18, pp. 28–29].

Municipal museums and a bank

Purchases on the island did not stop in 1974; they moved to other public institutions. The Leventis Municipal Museum of Nicosia built its collection of medieval glazed pottery by buying. In 1986 its Friends visited "the art dealer and collector Petros Colocassides to discuss the possibility of purchasing some medieval ceramics from him", and paid for twenty-six pieces in four instalments. In 1996 the Leventis Foundation bought 115 pieces "all found in Cyprus" from a private collector in Nicosia on the museum's behalf, and in January 2003 the museum concluded the purchase of 180 medieval pieces from another Nicosia collector [19, p. 21]. These are medieval ceramic finds, not church art.

The Bank of Cyprus began a coin collection, which the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation inherited at its foundation in 1984. Its curators described their acquisitions in 2001: "The acquisition of new specimens that enrich and broaden our collection is a constant effort and it is always preceded by scientific research. We purchase from authorised dealers" [20, p. 60].

The Church's payments for church art

“

This section is about church art: icons, frescoes, mosaics and liturgical objects, most of them medieval or later. They are not archaeological finds, and their trade was a separate market from the trade in ancient pottery, sculpture and metalwork. See church art and antiquities.

The Church of Cyprus paid for church art stolen from the occupied north, and its payments are the largest on record. In February 1997, for the operation that led to the Munich seizure from Aydın Dikmen (who was never convicted of anything), the organiser "raises the equivalent of about $500,000 from the Cypriot church to fund the operation", according to Mark Rose's account in Archaeology. Michel van Rijn acted as the intermediary. On 5 September he was paid a first instalment for the Kanakaria St Thaddeus mosaic; on 6 September, having bought 25 frescoes "using $75,000 of his own money", he "receives $168,000, of which $98,000 are expenses"; on 7 September he arranged the purchase of "seven larger frescoes for $49,000" [21].

Later returns were described as fees rather than purchases. The Kanakaria St Andrew medallion came back in 2018 after a London dealer agreed to return it once his expenses were covered; the €50,000 was paid by two Cypriot businessmen, as reported at the time, not by the Church [22]. The St Mark medallion came back in November 2018 from a British family "who bought the mosaic in good faith more than four decades ago", in return, AFP reported, for a "small fee to cover restoration and storage costs" [23]. In June 2024 an opinion column in the Cyprus Mail reported that "Bishop Porphyrios of Neapolis went ahead on his own accord and paid the German authorities" to release "sixty ecclesiastical and prehistoric artefacts", and that the Department of Antiquities "also contributed financially to the repatriation 'deal'"; the column opposed the payment, and no amount was given [24]. That group mixed church art with archaeology.

The Church has also said why it paid and when it would stop. In October 2024 the Bishop of Kykkos described the monastery's work, including "the purchase of many artefacts through auctions with an aim to repatriate them"; at the same meeting Archbishop Georgios said that the Church, "instead of purchasing stolen artefacts, should claim their return through legal routes" [25]. In September 2025 Bishop Porphyrios set out three routes: first, to persuade the owner "to return it to Cyprus without any payment"; second, "to claim objects presented at auction houses in cases where the cost of recovery will be less than reporting the case to Interpol and going to the courts"; third, for "objects of great value", Interpol, seizure and the courts [26]. The second route is a cost comparison with litigation. The report does not say whether claiming at auction includes paying.

The case against buying back

The strongest criticism of this policy is Samuel Hardy's. The choice between buying and claiming in court is set out in buying back: the recovery policy. In 2021 he concluded that "'Rescue' from the market creates a market for antiquities that can be 'rescued,' such as the publicly documented, 'portableised' artworks from churches in Cyprus, which could not have been sold to private collectors on the open market and were stolen in order to be ransomed back to the Republic of Cyprus" [27, p. 17]. Karageorghis himself wrote of "instances of blackmail" in the Hadjiprodromou case, where several pieces "passed into the hands of the 'secret market'" and "were bought by the State from 'intermediaries' in order to save them" [17, p. 2]. The 1997 figures show an intermediary paid $70,000 above his stated expenses on a single batch [21].

Hardy's argument is mainly about church art, and on church art it has force: unique, photographed objects with no lawful buyer except the owner are the case in which a buyer of last resort creates a motive to steal. The archaeological purchases look different on the record. They were one to four objects a year from dealers, under a rule that excluded identifiable objects, and the single published price is £8,000 for two pieces. They did not create a premium market in ordinary Cypriot pottery, whose prices are set out in the economics of looting. Prices for almost every purchase are unpublished, so the effect of buying on prices cannot be measured directly.

Two further limits belong on the page. The first is that lawful title is not lawful excavation. As Hardy quotes him, a later Director, Sophocles Hadjisavvas, said that the antiquities collected before 1974 were "illegal in the sense that they all came from illicit excavations" [28, p. 462], and the Museum's own heading for the Kouklia group says the same of its purchase [5]. A registered or lawfully exported object is not thereby a lawfully excavated one. The second is the word "repatriation". The Foundation described its purchases as "antiquities of unknown provenance that found their way abroad as a result of the Turkish occupation of the Northern part of the island" [13, p. 13]. Some had other histories. The bronze stand was dug by looters in 1972; a bronze head from the Sinda hoard, found clandestinely in 1971, "Only this object was repatriated from the entire hoard, after having been purchased by the Foundation" [13, p. 67]; and the Hadjiprodromou picrolites probably came from Souskiou, a cemetery in the south looted before 1974 [13, p. 58]. The reason given was the buyer's, and it is reported here as theirs.

What each buyer said it was doing

What the record means for an object on the market today

For forty years the Cyprus Museum bought Cypriot antiquities "de provenance inconnue" from licensed dealers and published the purchases, and for thirty more years its partners bought on the London market and gave the objects to the Museum. The same market supplied private buyers on the island and abroad, and before 1996 those buyers could export under licence (see the legal export of Cypriot antiquities). An undocumented Cypriot object on sale today may have passed through that market, and the state's own practice treated such objects as things to be bought, not as presumptive loot; how the market now reads them is the subject of the 1974 presumption.

The policy has changed. The Archbishop's line of 2024 is to claim, not buy, and the Bishop of Neapolis's routes of 2025 begin with persuading the holder to return an object without payment [25; 26]. For an owner, the practical point is documentation: an export licence, a sale receipt, an old label or a published photograph is what separates an object from the presumption. Guidance is in collecting Cypriot antiquities today and provenance and provenience.