The Trade in Cypriot Antiquities since 1996: The Twenty-First-Century Market

Since 1996 no Cypriot antiquity has left the Republic of Cyprus lawfully for private sale abroad. The amendment of that year to the Antiquities Law closed the last lawful channel, and every Cypriot object sold on the international market since then has come from stock that was already outside the island: the material exported over about 150 years, from the Ottoman firmans to the export licences of the 1990s, and re-sold as collections are broken up and estates are settled. This entry describes how that market has worked in the thirty years since: the law around it, the tiers of auction houses and dealers, what Cypriot antiquities have sold for, the old collections that have come up for sale, the museums' rule on the 1970 date, and the Department of Antiquities' monitoring of sales abroad. A separate section sets out the evidence against this account and what the record says in reply. The head at the top of the page is a Cypriot limestone head of the sixth century BCE from the nineteenth-century collection of Louis de Clercq, later held by the Athens dealer Nicolas Koutoulakis until 1979, and bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2020: an object of the kind the modern market and the museums now prefer, with a history that can be checked back to the 1900s.

The 1996 amendment and the closed supply

Between 1974 and 1996 the Republic still let private antiquities leave the island under licence: objects registered in the declaration of December 1973, and finds the Cyprus Museum did not need, could be exported with a permit from the Department. That channel, its licences and lead seals, and the dealers who used it are described in licensed export, 1974 to 1996. The amending law of 1996, Law 4(I)/1996, ended it. Section 26 of the Antiquities Law now reads "No person shall deal in antiquities", and section 27 allows an export licence only for temporary exhibition, long-term loan to a museum or university, scientific study of excavated material, or a gift by the President; "no licence shall be granted for the export of a private collection" [1, ss. 26, 27]. Declared antiquities can still be owned, inherited and transferred inside Cyprus with notice to the Director [1, s. 33].

The effect on the trade abroad is simple to state. After 1996 the supply of Cypriot antiquities outside the island became a fixed stock, which can only shrink as objects enter museums, are returned to Cyprus or are lost. It is a large stock. Luigi Palma di Cesnola alone removed about 35,000 objects, and the Metropolitan Museum's sales of his "duplicates" in 1928 put thousands into private hands; the Swedish Cyprus Expedition took about two thirds of 18,000 finds to Stockholm; the Cyprus Museum sold antiquities over its own counter, and the licensed dealers in Nicosia exported for decades. The figures, channel by channel, are in how many Cypriot antiquities left lawfully. An object sold in London or New York in 2026 is therefore, in nearly every case, an object that has been outside Cyprus for decades and is changing hands again.

The legal frame abroad

Outside Cyprus the law changed in the same decade. Cyprus joined the European Union on 1 May 2004. Within the Union a member state can sue in another member state's courts for the return of a cultural object unlawfully removed from its territory, now under Directive 2014/60/EU [2], and the export of archaeological objects from the Union's customs territory needs a licence under Regulation (EC) No 116/2009 [18]. The newer import regime, Regulation (EU) 2019/880, which since 28 June 2025 has required an import licence for archaeological objects more than 250 years old, applies only to goods created or discovered outside the Union's customs territory [7]; because Cyprus is a member state, an ancient Cypriot object falls outside it.

In the United States, import restrictions under a bilateral agreement with Cyprus have applied since July 2002 to pre-Classical and Classical archaeological material [3]. They were extended in 2007, when coins of Cypriot types were added [4], and they have been renewed since, most recently in 2022, when the list was widened to archaeology down to AD 1770 [5]. Emergency restrictions on Byzantine church material had come first, in 1999. The restrictions govern what crosses the American border; an object already in the country before its class was listed is not affected. In Britain, the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act 2003 makes it an offence to deal dishonestly in an object "knowing or believing" it to be tainted, which means excavated or removed unlawfully after the Act came into force on 30 December 2003 [6]; a pot that left Cyprus before then cannot be tainted under it. Each of these instruments is treated in full in the law-and-provenance part of this section. Together they mean that a Cypriot object dug since about 2003 is hard to sell openly in any of the main markets, while the old stock remains lawful to own and to sell.

The three tiers of the market

The trade in Cypriot antiquities since 1996 has run on three levels, and the dividing line between them is documented history rather than the kind of object.

At the top are the three major houses, Christie's, Sotheby's and Bonhams, which offer Cypriot antiquities in their mixed antiquities sales in London, New York and, for Christie's, Paris. Cypriot material is a small share of what they sell. Marc Fehlmann, writing from Eastern Mediterranean University in occupied Famagusta in an openly polemical chapter on the Cypriot heritage, gives the count for the two largest: of 52,482 antiquities offered by Christie's and Sotheby's between 1988 and 2008, 1,842 (4%) were Cypriot, 377 of them with a recorded history before 1970 and 15 traceable to Cesnola [8, p. 161]. These houses print a provenance line for each lot and ask for a history that can be checked. That requirement is not the same as a rule against anything first recorded after 1970, a point taken up below; what the record shows is that a fresh, undocumented object does not reach these rooms, and that none of the Department of Antiquities' withdrawals of 2025 and 2026 was at one of them.

Below them sits a much larger number of regional and general salerooms in Britain, the United States and continental Europe, and the online antiquities houses that hold frequent timed sales with low estimates. Here Cypriot pots arrive from house clearances and estates, often as one lot among the contents of a house, with a line such as "from a private collection" or no history at all. Most Cypriot lots by number now sell at this level, and this is also where the Department's officers find the objects they ask to have withdrawn. Its monitoring of sales abroad, the requests to auction houses, and the withdrawals and voluntary returns of 2024 to 2026 are set out case by case in policing and monitoring. In brief, every withdrawal of 2025 and 2026 was at a small regional or online house; nearly every object was an ordinary Bichrome, Black-on-Red, White Painted or Base Ring vessel; and no announcement named a trafficker or gave a findspot.

The third level is the dealers' trade: galleries in London, New York, Paris, Brussels and Switzerland, and the art fairs at which some of them exhibit. Cypriot material forms a small part of most antiquities dealers' stock. Galleries sell more expensive single objects than the online houses, and the larger fairs vet antiquities before they open; a dealer's invoice, with a description and a stated source, is one of the documents that later carries an object's history forward. The trade between dealers and private buyers leaves no public price record, so what follows on prices comes from the salerooms.

Prices and volume since 1996

The figures in this section come from our own unpublished research: a compilation of public auction results for Cypriot antiquities, with prices converted to US dollars at fixed rates, given in nominal terms and including the buyer's premium where the saleroom reports it. The price bands by class are tabled in the economics of looting and are not repeated here.

Across 3,516 sold Cypriot lots of every kind the median price was about $890, and the median sold vessel, in a sample of 2,168, about $820. The direction since 2019 has been down. The yearly median for a sold vessel was about $960 in 2019 and between $285 and $420 in each year from 2024 to 2026. Much of that fall reflects where Cypriot antiquities are sold rather than a fall in what a given object is worth. In the sample for 2023 to 2026, 482 sold lots with coins excluded, 439 (about 91%) went through low-cost venues, with a median of about $400, and 43 through the major houses, with a median of about $3,780. The major houses sell most of the Cypriot lots they offer: Bonhams about 89% in the sample. Many of the online houses sell only 40 to 50% of theirs, and often below the low estimate.

The volume of Cypriot material at the top of the market is modest. Fehlmann's count gives the two largest houses about 90 Cypriot lots a year between 1988 and 2008 [8, p. 161]. The count of major-house sales in our sample for 2023 to 2026 is lower, though the two measures were made differently and are not directly comparable. What both show is a market in which Cypriot antiquities are a few per cent of the antiquities offered at the top, and in which the number of lots has grown at the bottom as online sales have multiplied.

The top end is real and narrow. About 3% of sold Cypriot lots in our sample reached $10,000, and under 1% reached $50,000. The highest prices since 1996 went to sculpture and rare figures with long histories: a Chalcolithic picrolite figure at €448,250 at Christie's Paris, sale 5080, lot 509, in 2003; a limestone head from the de Clercq collection, through Koutoulakis, at £158,500 at Christie's London, 1 October 2015, lot 65; a head from the Cesnola collection and the Metropolitan Museum at $150,000 at Christie's New York, 25 April 2017, lot 232, more than four times its high estimate; and a Red Polished plank figure with a Paris sale history of 1967 at £53,740 at Bonhams London, 6 July 2023, lot 47, against an estimate of £5,000 to £7,000. A Late Bronze Age copper oxhide ingot made $208,250 in 2024. Nearly every lot above $50,000 was sold at a major house with a documented history going back decades.

Old collections sold since 1996

The supply described above reaches the market collection by collection. Some of the sales since 1996 are known by their published titles.

On 6 November 2001 Christie's South Kensington sold "The Art of Ancient Cyprus: The Desmond Morris Collection", sale 9296 [15]. The collection had been formed abroad from 1967, chiefly at London salerooms and from dealers, and published in 1985, so each object carried a check-list number and a pre-1985 history. The A. G. Leventis Foundation bought at the sale, including a Red Polished model of a grape-treading installation, and gave it to the Department of Antiquities on 23 January 2002; Vassos Karageorghis published it as "repatriated" and presumed from its type that it came from the cemeteries of the Kyrenia mountains. The case is set out in northern types with lawful histories. Pieces from the sale have kept circulating with the history attached: Bonhams sold two Plain Red Polished bowls in London on 28 November 2019 with the Christie's lot number in their provenance, and an ex-Morris piece made €700 at Setdart, Barcelona, on 23 October 2023, lot 57, which shows that a documented history alone does not lift the price of an ordinary pot.

Museum sales have added to the stock. The Metropolitan Museum's sales of Cesnola material in the early twentieth century still feed the market: a Cesnola limestone funerary relief, acquired by the Met in the 1870s, sold for $20,400 at Christie's New York, sale 1734, lot 87, in 2006, and a painted tankard that went from the Met to the Toledo Museum of Art in 1916 sold at Christie's in 2016 for $8,750 (see export licences and labels). In October 2016 the Toledo Museum of Art sent nearly 70 antiquities to Christie's New York, among them a Cypriot limestone votary head; the Cypriot ambassador in Washington asked the museum to postpone, and the sale went ahead and brought about $1.2 million [11; 20]. The contents of the Cyprus Museum in Jacksonville, North Carolina, a private museum founded in 1988 with material exported from Cyprus, were later largely sold at auction after it closed; that dispersal is the subject of a separate article.

The same pattern runs through smaller sales. Collections formed by colonial officials, servicemen, diplomats and visitors who bought from the licensed dealers or the Cyprus Museum's counter come up as their owners' estates are settled, usually at regional salerooms and usually without the paper that once went with them. The guide for executors covers what heirs should look for, and the articles on objects brought home from Cyprus and how the Cyprus Museum sold antiquities describe where much of this material came from.

The Republic's partners were among the buyers after 1996. The Leventis Foundation, which had bought Cypriot antiquities since 1974 that, in Karageorghis's words, "cannot be acquired except by purchase from antiquities dealers" [17], continued to buy into the 2000s, and the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation's coin curators wrote in 2001, "We purchase from authorised dealers" [16, p. 60]. Those purchases, with each buyer's stated reason, are listed in the state as buyer.

Museums and the 1970 rule

The museums that once bought Cypriot antiquities on the open market have largely stopped buying anything without a history. In the United States, the Association of Art Museum Directors revised its guidelines in 2008 so that a member museum should normally acquire an archaeological object only if it can be shown to have been outside its country of probable modern discovery before 17 November 1970, the date of the UNESCO Convention, or to have been exported lawfully after that date; the guidelines in force since 4 June 2008 replaced an older test that accepted ten years of known history, and the 2013 revision kept the 1970 threshold and applied it to gifts and bequests as well as purchases [10].

For Cypriot material the effect is to divide the stock in two. Objects with a record before 1970, such as a Cesnola number, a nineteenth-century collection catalogue, a dated sale catalogue or an export licence, can still go to a museum, as the de Clercq head at the head of this page went to the Metropolitan Museum by bequest. Objects without one cannot, whatever their real history, and they stay in private hands or go to the cheaper end of the market. The article on UNESCO 1970 and the ethics of modern collections discusses the date and its consequences for old collections.

The evidence against this account

The account above rests on two claims: that the Cypriot market since 1996 lives on old, lawfully exported stock, and that undocumented material is pushed to the bottom of it. The strongest evidence against both is as follows.

The top end exists and is concentrated in classes worth stealing. Picrolite figures, limestone heads, plank figures and gold and silver coins can each fetch thousands or tens of thousands. A thin top end is still a reason to dig, for whoever finds such a piece.

The major houses have sold Cypriot pieces whose recorded history begins after 1970. Christie's New York sold a Late Archaic limestone votary, sale 18807, lot 320, on 28 October 2019, with a history beginning at a Zurich gallery and a purchase in 1977; it made $10,000, below its low estimate. Christie's London sold a limestone head of Herakles, sale 23881, lot 22, on 3 December 2025, whose history begins at a provincial French auction in 1989; it made £5,334. In 2016 the European Association of Archaeologists said that auction houses "continue to present the bulk of their stock without a complete provenance" before 1970 [13]. A major house has also sold stolen Cypriot material: a kernos taken from the Hadjiprodromou collection in occupied Famagusta after the Turkish invasion was sold at Sotheby's London in 1982 and offered there again in 2014, before the Department identified it; it was returned in 2016 [14]. The case is in the Hadjiprodromou collection.

Coins are a market of their own. Cypriot staters have a median of about $950 in our own unpublished research (153 sold lots), the main coin house sells them well above estimate on average, and coin catalogues rarely print a findspot or a collection history. In 2009 an American collectors' association imported 23 Cypriot and Chinese coins from a London dealer through Baltimore to test the 2007 restrictions; customs detained them, and in 2012 the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that the restrictions had been lawfully applied [12]. The coin trade argued that coins of Cypriot types had circulated far beyond the island for two millennia and could not be traced to a modern find in Cyprus; the restrictions treat them as Cypriot archaeological material all the same.

Objects with no history do sell. About nine in ten Cypriot lots now sell at venues where many carry no provenance at all, and most of those sales go through without objection.

Much of the old stock was dug illicitly before it left. Sophocles Hadjisavvas, a later Director of Antiquities, said of the antiquities collected on the island before 1974 that they were "illegal in the sense that they all came from illicit excavations", as Samuel Hardy quotes him [9, p. 462]. Using a method he himself calls "crude" [9, p. 459], Hardy found that "214 (67.08%) of the 319 objects" in two Louvre catalogues of Cypriot antiquities acquired before the conflict "were neither scientifically excavated nor found through survey or by accident" [9, p. 466]. Lawful export is not lawful excavation, and a large part of the stock that the market now re-sells came out of the ground without a record; the decade 1963 to 1973 is set out in collecting under the silent accord.

Finally, low prices are partly the result of enforcement. Monitoring, the American restrictions and the museums' rule lower the price of undocumented material, so the cheapness of the bottom tier is evidence that the rules work as well as evidence about supply. The Republic and the Church have also paid to recover objects since 1996, chiefly church art from the occupied north after the Munich seizure of 1997, and those payments went to intermediaries (see the state as buyer).

The record answers these points as follows. The top-end prices since 1996 went, nearly all, to objects with documented histories at the major houses: the de Clercq and Cesnola heads, the plank figure with a 1967 sale record. A fresh find has no such history and cannot earn those prices. The post-1970 lots at Christie's carried a paper trail of the late 1970s or 1980s that could be checked, and the 2019 votary sold below estimate; what fresh loot lacks is any trail at all. The kernos was caught because it had been registered in 1973, which is how the Department's archive works against stolen material. Coins are a genuine exception and are treated on their own in the coin entry of this sub-hub. The undocumented pots that sell at small venues are, by class, the same Bichrome, Black-on-Red, White Painted and Base Ring vessels that left the island by the thousand while export was lawful, and they sell for a few hundred dollars. Hardy's evidence concerns the digging of the 1960s and earlier; it shows that much of the old stock was illicitly excavated, and it says nothing against its export having been lawful or against its having left before 1996.

What the record means for an object on the market today

A Cypriot antiquity offered for sale today almost always left the island before 1996, and usually long before. Its price and its route to market depend on the history that can be shown for it. An object with a documented record before 1970, or with a licence or seal of 1974 to 1996 that the Department can check, can be sold at a major house, given to a museum, and published, and it commands the higher prices. An object without one sells at a regional or online saleroom for a fraction of that, if it sells, and it is the kind of object the Department of Antiquities asks to have withdrawn under the 1974 presumption. An object dug in Cyprus since 1996 has no lawful route out of the island, and since 2003 it has been a tainted object under British law. The documents that support a lawful history, and their limits, are compared in lawful and illicit in the record and in collecting Cypriot antiquities today.

For an owner or heir, the useful step is to gather whatever survives (labels, numbers on the base, letters, receipts, old photographs, a sale catalogue) before offering the object, and to ask before consigning rather than after a withdrawal. The site's guides cover selling in the UK, selling in the US, buying, returning or donating and what a Cypriot antiquity is worth. Declared pieces can be sold in specific circumstances, and the answer for a given object usually depends on its paper. We identify Cypriot objects without charge through /identify, and help owners trace an object's history; if you have a piece and are unsure of its position, contact us.