Heirs and Old Collections: Where the Cypriot Antiquities on Today's Market Come From

Since an amendment of 1996 to the Antiquities Law, no antiquity has left the Republic of Cyprus lawfully for a private owner. The law now allows export only for exhibition, loan, study and presidential gifts, and it says outright that no licence may be granted for the export of a private collection [1]. Every Cypriot pot, figurine or limestone head sold abroad since then was therefore already abroad, or left unlawfully. On the record, most of it was already abroad: it left over the previous century and a half through partage, the Cyprus Museum's saleroom, the licensed dealers and numbered export licences, and it comes up again when an owner dies, a family clears a house or an old collection is sold. This entry describes that supply: who brought the objects home, how they reach the saleroom, why so few still have their papers, and how the 1974 presumption now falls on them. It also sets out the smaller stream that runs inside it, of looted pieces and stolen church art offered with invented histories. The photograph at the head of the page shows the Cypriot antiquities of a colonial judge, George Cyril Griffith-Williams, laid out together: Bronze Age jugs and juglets, terracotta fragments and a chocolate box of Neolithic sherds, the kind of modest group that fills most estates.

Why the market since 1996 lives on old stock

The scale of the old export explains the modern market. Luigi Palma di Cesnola alone took tens of thousands of objects to New York, and the Metropolitan Museum later sold much of what it held: before 1928 through sales over the counter and a large group to Stanford University, and in 1928 at the Anderson Galleries in New York, where "two thousand three hundred objects were bought by the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota" [5, p. 23]. The collection that Alessandro Palma di Cesnola gathered for Edwin Henry Lawrence, more than 14,000 items, was sold in London between 1883 and 1892 to General Pitt Rivers and a great many private buyers, and Pitt Rivers's own collection was in turn sold by his family in the 1950s or 1960s [6]. Each dispersal sent lawfully exported objects back into private hands in quantity and broke the link between object and record. The volumes by channel are set out in how many Cypriot antiquities left lawfully.

The major salerooms show the same stock coming round again. Martin Fehlmann counted every antiquity offered by Christie's and Sotheby's between 1988 and 2008: 52,482 objects, of which 1,842 (4 per cent) could be identified as Cypriot. Of those, "377 had a provenance or previous history of ownership that dated back to the time before 1970, and 15 of these could even be traced back to Palma Luigi di Cesnola", put on the market in the 1920s when the Met was deaccessioning the Cesnola collection [3, p. 161]. Fehlmann wrote from Eastern Mediterranean University in occupied Famagusta and argues against the Republic's figures for loss; his count of documented old stock at the two largest houses is the best published measure of how much of the trade is resale.

Who brought Cypriot antiquities home

Six overlapping groups supplied the private stock that now comes up in estates. The table gives each with an example from the published record.

The nineteenth-century buyers. The first great exports went to museums, but much did not stay there, and some never went. The bankers and consuls of Larnaca, among them Robert Hamilton Lang, Demetrios Pierides and the French consul Tiburce Colonna-Ceccaldi, sold to museums and to private buyers alike, and the dealer-excavator Max Ohnefalsch-Richter sold widely in Berlin, Vienna, Paris and the United States. Their private buyers' cabinets are the deepest layer of the modern supply. The Paris collector Louis de Clercq is the clearest case: most of his collection went to the Louvre in 1967 through his heir, and a Bonhams sale of 2013 offered a fifth-century limestone head whose history was traced back to him [2, p. 38]. The Pierides collection is the opposite case: it passed by inheritance, stayed on the island and became a museum (the Pierides family collection).

Colonial officials and judges, 1878 to 1960. British rule put administrators, engineers and lawyers on the island for eighty years, and many of them bought. The Wisbech and Fenland Museum holds the objects of Cecil Lee, an accountant in the Public Works Department from 1921 to 1935, which its record describes as coming "from tombs in the vicinity of Nicosia and Famagusta", given by his family in 1935; the sister of William Mackay, a Limassol harbour official and later Collector of Customs, gave four more pots [9]. Griffith-Williams, a judge of the Supreme Court from 1938 and later of the Sovereign Base Areas, excavated two looted tombs at Dhenia in 1953 with the Department's sponsorship and kept a small collection at home, now in the Drakopoulos collection (the judge and the chocolate box).

Servicemen and the bases. Soldiers passed through Cyprus in both world wars, tens of thousands served in the Emergency of 1955 to 1959, and the Sovereign Base Areas at Akrotiri and Dhekelia kept service families on the island after independence in 1960. In 1941 Thomas Shaw Anderson, a warrant officer of the Australian 2/7th Cavalry (Commando) Regiment, bought a Bronze Age juglet and an Iron Age figurine fragment from the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia; they still carried their saleroom labels when his son gave them to the University of Queensland's antiquities museum in late 2024, and the Cypriot authorities confirmed that "the 2 artefacts were legally purchased in 1941" [8]. James Alfred Brew, an art teacher at British services schools in the 1960s, scratched "Paphos 1965" on a lamp and lent his collection to the Ashmolean in 1972 (Brew's plank figures). No one has counted how many antiquities servicemen brought home, and no figure is given here.

Diplomats and United Nations personnel. Licence No. 6403 of 5 October 1972 covered 42 objects for the American diplomat William Rex Crawford, and the original survives [4, p. 11]. The United Nations force arrived in March 1964; an Austrian colonel who headed the Austrian UNFICYP medical centre from 1973 formed a group of 113 objects, seven of which still carry export numbers [4]. Some diplomatic families have chosen to give such pieces back. In November 2021, 38 antiquities that had belonged to Fraser Wilkins, the first United States ambassador to Cyprus (1960 to 1964), were handed to the Cyprus Embassy in Washington by his family; the report says nothing about how they were acquired [10].

Tourists, residents and saleroom buyers to 1996. The Cyprus Museum sold "duplicates" from the 1920s until 1991, and licensed dealers sold to visitors under the 1935 law until 1996. In 2014 a Red Polished jug at Bonhams carried "a copy of the Cypriot Government export license dated 20/10/1964"; the Department of Antiquities found the licence in its own list, for "one Bronze Age jug, which was bought for the price of eight Cyprus pounds by an American national from an authorised antiquities' dealer in Cyprus on the 28th September 1964" [2, p. 37]. A Bichrome bowl offered in London had been "acquired during the 1950s–1960s from P. Kolokasides, Cyprus", with a Cyprus Museum lead export tag on the handle and an old typed card, and the Department again verified it [2, p. 38]. Its first owner was the British botanist Oleg Polunin.

Old collections sold by name

Named collections carry their history with them, and the best of them sell at the top of the market. A Christie's sale in London on 1 October 2015 offered an Archaic limestone male head with the history "Louis de Clercq (1836–1901), Paris, by descent; with N. Koutoulakis, Paris and Geneva, 1960s; private collection, Europe, by descent"; it sold for £158,500 [12]. The dealer's part in the dispersal of the de Clercq collection is set out in Nicolas Koutoulakis. In New York on 25 April 2017 an Archaic votary head "said to be from the Temple at Golgoi", with a history through Cesnola and the Metropolitan Museum, sold for $150,000 against an estimate of $25,000 to $35,000 [13]. A Red Polished plank figure at Bonhams in July 2023, sold at a Paris auction in June 1967 and then held by descent in a London family, made £42,000 at the hammer on an estimate of £5,000 to £7,000 [14]. The Department of Antiquities has noted the same effect online: a fourth-century head deaccessioned from the Met's Cesnola collection opened at an American online sale at $29,995, a high price by the standard of the sale, "probably due to its 'safe' acquisition history" [2, p. 38].

The same names can also mislead. A collection sold under a dead collector's name is not proof that every object in it was clean, because collectors bought from many sources over many years. The illicit cases below include a piece sold at Sotheby's in 2014 under the published sale title of the private collection of the late Stanley J. Seeger. A named collection is the start of a history, and each object in it still needs its own.

How heirs' pieces surface, and why most have no paper

Most of this stock does not reach the market through a named sale. It arrives as a probate valuation, a house clearance or a box at a regional auction, catalogued as "property of a deceased estate" or "by descent". The executor's side of this is set out in antiquities in an estate. By the time the pots reach a valuer, the paper has usually gone. The researchers who traced one large German collection back to its Cypriot owners found that lead export seals had been "often removed largely for aesthetic reasons" and that permits were "often lost" [4, p. 7]. A licence was a sheet of paper issued to the buyer, not kept with the pot, and it went the way of most household paper over fifty years. What survives in its place is family memory: a grandfather's posting, a parents' honeymoon, a house in Kyrenia in the 1960s. That memory is often true and is seldom enough on its own.

The Department of Antiquities' own reading of online catalogues shows how thin the histories become. Its officer listed typical lines: "ex private collection", "private collection, Wiltshire", "American private collection, acquired in London in the mid 1990s", "From upstate New York estate", "ex private collection, Switzerland, acquired 1980s", and concluded that "most cases do not even reach the 1970 UNESCO threshold" [2, p. 36]. Some of those lines describe pieces that left Cyprus lawfully long ago and simply lost the record of it. The catalogue cannot say which.

Heirs also choose not to sell. Alphas recorded "a growing trend" of "individuals, both in Cyprus and abroad," who "wish to donate their parents' collections of Cypriot antiquities to the DoA" [2, p. 39]. In 2024 the heir of a German citizen who had worked at the German Embassy in Cyprus asked the Cyprus Embassy in Berlin to hand over 37 antiquities he had taken from the island between 1964 and 1968; they went back in July 2024 [11]. The report does not say whether the removal was licensed, and nothing more is claimed here. These returns, and the gifts to museums at Wisbech and Queensland, are part of the same supply: old stock leaving private hands, by gift instead of sale. The routes are in returning or donating Cypriot antiquities.

The 1974 presumption and the family piece

The Turkish invasion of 1974 made the date-line, and the 1970 UNESCO Convention made the market's benchmark. A Cypriot object with no history is now treated as suspect until shown otherwise, though most such objects left lawfully (the 1974 presumption). The major houses ask for a history they can check, so an heir's pot with nothing but a family story is usually declined there, or accepted only with the family dates written down. It then goes to an online or regional saleroom, and that is where the Department of Antiquities watches. The withdrawals and returns of 2024 to 2026, nearly all ordinary pots at small houses, are set out in policing and monitoring; the announcements thank the holders and do not say who they were or how the objects reached them.

The presumption falls hardest on the commonest objects. An ordinary Red Polished jug or Bichrome juglet is the kind of object the saleroom and the licensed dealers sold to officials, servicemen and tourists in quantity, and the kind a withdrawal notice describes. When paper survives, the Department can confirm it: the 1964 licence, the Polunin tag and the 1941 saleroom labels were each checked against its archive [2, pp. 37–38; 8]. When nothing survives, the Department's officer wrote that proving looting "is very difficult and in most cases impossible, unless the objects have been recorded in official archives in the past" [2, p. 36]. The presumption therefore settles nothing about a single pot. It decides where the pot can be sold.

Loot and invented histories in the same stream

A minority of what comes up as old stock is not. The clearest cases come from the registered collection of Christakis Hadjiprodromou in Famagusta, lost after the invasion (the Hadjiprodromou collection). A Cypro-Archaic horse-and-rider from it was found in 2016 on the website of a London gallery, priced at £2,500, with the history "Ex German private collection ... Berlin. Previously on the European market and purchased at auction in the 1970s/1980s"; its photograph and measurements matched the Department's archive, and the gallery handed it to the Metropolitan Police [2, p. 36]. A Cypro-Geometric ring-vase from the same collection was photographed in Turkey on its way to the European market, sold at Sotheby's in July 1982 under "Various Properties", reappeared at Sotheby's in 2014 in the sale of the private collection of the late Stanley J. Seeger, and was identified on a London online gallery in July 2016 and returned that November [2, p. 37]. Two catalogued sales at a major house had carried it as old stock.

Church art is a separate trade with its own record (church art and antiquities), and its sellers told the most detailed false stories. When the Kanakaria mosaics were offered to an Indianapolis dealer in 1988, the seller was said to have "found" them in the rubble of an "extinct" church in northern Cyprus while working as "an archaeologist from Turkey assigned to northern Cyprus", and to have been allowed to export them to Germany in the late 1970s; the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana rejected that account and ordered the mosaics returned to the Church of Cyprus [15] (the Kanakaria mosaics).

Lawful export and lawful excavation are also different things inside the old stock itself. Nicholas Stanley-Price shows that the Cyprus Museum's saleroom "duplicates" were often material seized from illicit diggers and judged surplus, and that many of the pieces Rupert Gunnis sold were probably the products of illicit excavation [7]. Cecil Lee's objects "from tombs" near Nicosia and Famagusta [9], and the looted tombs Griffith-Williams cleared at Dhenia, came out of the ground in ways no one would now license. Such a piece left the island lawfully if it went with a licence, and its history before that is another question. The site keeps the two apart in every entry.

The evidence against this reading

The strongest objection is in Fehlmann's own count. If 377 of 1,842 Cypriot lots at the two largest houses had a history before 1970 [3, p. 161], the other four-fifths did not, at the venues that check most carefully. Some of those were surely old stock whose papers had gone, but the count cannot show how many, and an undocumented object at a major house in those years was not necessarily an heir's. The houses did not strictly refuse later material either; the accurate statement is that they now require a history they can check.

The second objection is that undocumented objects do sell, and some sell well. Prices for ordinary pottery are low, with a median of about $820 for a sold Cypriot vessel in our own unpublished research on 2,168 sales, but a thin top end exists, and a looter or a seller with a good story can aim at it (the economics of looting). The third is Samuel Hardy's reading of the 1963 to 1973 period, when the island's own collections bought freshly dug material under the "silent accord"; he counts about two-thirds of the objects in the island's pre-conflict collections as neither excavated nor reported chance finds [16]. Diplomats and foreign mission staff bought in the same years, and some objects that later left with them or in luggage came from that digging (collecting under the silent accord). Finally, export without a licence was an offence at every date from 1905, and many family pieces probably left in a kitbag or a suitcase; their owners bought openly and exported unlawfully.

The record answers these in part. The proved cases of loot presented as old stock are few and are concentrated in two categories: the dispersed northern collections and church art. The withdrawals of recent years have caught ordinary pots of the classes exported in quantity, and none has named a trafficker (policing and monitoring). And the families who kept papers have, case after case, had them confirmed against the Department's archive [2, pp. 37–38; 8]. The objections show why the presumption exists. They do not show that the typical estate piece is loot.

What this means for an heir or executor today

An inherited Cypriot antiquity is most likely what it appears to be: an object bought decades ago by an official, a soldier, a diplomat, a resident or a tourist, through channels that were lawful at the time, with its papers since lost. Owning an inherited piece is, in general, lawful in Britain and the United States. Whether it can be sold, given or returned depends on what can be shown about when it left Cyprus, and that file is easiest to lose in the first weeks of an estate.

Keep every paper: licences, receipts, saleroom labels and tickets, typed cards, letters home, photographs of the objects or of the family in Cyprus, service records, old insurance lists and earlier probate inventories. Leave lead seals and labels where they are, keep boxes and wrappings, and keep objects bought together in their group. Do not clean, glue or "restore" anything, since old dirt, old repairs and old labels are evidence. Write down the family's dates in Cyprus while someone still remembers them. The general rules are in what to do with antiquities, the reading of licences and labels in export licences and labels, and the family-history side in brought home from Cyprus.

Then get in touch. We can usually identify the pieces, say what the family history and any marks show, and explain the options, which include keeping, selling where the history allows it, giving to a museum and returning to Cyprus. A piece with paper can often be confirmed, and a piece without paper is not a reason to give up or to put it in an anonymous online sale. When it depends, the next step is to contact us.