Christ Antiphonitis: The Frescoes and Icons of a Kyrenia Range Church after 1974

The church of Christ Antiphonitis stands in a secluded valley in the pine forest of the Kyrenia range, in the territory of Kalograia, the last village at the eastern end of the Kyrenia district [1, p. 465]. It belonged to a disused monastery, and it was known for two series of wall paintings, one of the end of the twelfth century and one of about 1500, which included a Last Judgement and a Tree of Jesse. After the Turkish invasion of 1974 the church was in the occupied north. Within a few years its iconostasis icons had gone and the later paintings had been cut from the walls in pieces. Most of those pieces passed through the Munich stock of Aydın Dikmen. They came back to Cyprus in instalments between 1997 and 2015, through a purchase, a police seizure and a long civil case in Germany; four icons came back from the Netherlands in 2013 and one from Switzerland in 2022. The photograph at the head of this page shows the church in 1973, the year before the invasion.

The church and its paintings before 1974

The church is a single-aisled building whose large dome covers the whole nave and rests on eight round stone pillars set in an irregular octagon. Andreas and Judith Stylianou, whose survey of the painted churches of Cyprus is the standard description, called it "the only church of its type which has survived intact" and dated it to the end of the twelfth century; the vaulted narthex and the ruined south loggia were added in the Frankish period [1, pp. 465–466].

The paintings belonged to two periods. The first, in the bema and the south-west corner of the nave, was a local version of the late Comnenian style of the Panagia tou Arakou at Lagoudera (1192): the Virgin with two archangels in the apse, prelates, deacons, stylites, a Baptism and a Transfiguration [1, pp. 466–469]. The second covered most of the nave. The Stylianous placed it in the last decade of the fifteenth century. It comprised the Last Judgement on the north wall, with Christ in an iridescent aureole, the river of fire and a winged personification of Hell; the Tree of Jesse on the south wall; a cycle of the life of the Virgin; and the Pantocrator, angels and twelve apostles in the dome [1, pp. 472–477]. The catalogue of the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia, where the recovered fragments are now kept, dates the same paintings to the early sixteenth century [9]. The two dates are about a decade apart and refer to the same series.

The Stylianous published their account in 1985. By then they had "no access to the church", and they worked "from notes and photographs taken before 1974" [1, p. 480]. Those photographs are the record against which the fragments were later identified.

What was removed, and when

The first report came within two years of the invasion. In the summer of 1976 the Thames Television correspondent John Fielding reached the church and described doors battered in, "eleventh and twelfth century treasures looted, fifteenth century frescoes plastered with asbestos cement, the newer icons smashed", and someone had chalked the date "March 6, 1975" on the wrecked iconostasis. His account was printed in documents submitted by Father Evagoras Constantinides to the United States Helsinki Commission in 1985 [3, p. 52]. Mark Rose, writing in Archaeology in 1998, says that an English reporter told the Church in 1976 that the frescoes had been removed, and that an Anglican priest who visited in 1979 confirmed it [4].

The icons left the island early. Four sixteenth-century icons of the apostles Peter, Paul, John and Mark from the iconostasis were bought in the Netherlands in the 1970s, and they were shown in an exhibition of icons from private collections at the Prinsenhof Museum in Delft from 17 December 1976 to 15 January 1977 [5, p. 342]. They were out of Cyprus within about two years of the invasion.

The walls were stripped in more than one campaign. Farid Mirbagheri records that the church was looted twice, the first time when frescoes were cut from the walls, and the second when an attempt brought down a section of wall and destroyed the painting on it [6, pp. 73–74]. The two twelfth-century archangels in the apse, "preserved in excellent condition until 1979", were destroyed in that year [2, p. 95]. In 1989 the consultant Robin Cormack listed "the remaining decoration of Antiphonitis" among the priorities for saving what was left in the north [7, p. 132].

Samuel Hardy, drawing on articles in the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet in 1989 and on Church of Cyprus sources, lists the wall paintings of "Christos Antiphonitis near Kalograia" among the works taken from at least fifty churches and institutions in the occupied north by the network he associates with Dikmen [8, p. 129]. That attribution is Hardy's and his sources'. Dikmen was never convicted of anything.

The buy-back and the Munich seizure of 1997

The largest return came in 1997. In September of that year Michel van Rijn, acting as intermediary for Tasoula Georgiou-Hadjitofi, honorary consul of Cyprus in The Hague, bought fresco fragments from Dikmen for return to the Church. Rose gives the sequence: on 6 September van Rijn bought 25 frescoes through intermediaries "using $75,000 of his own money", and received $168,000, "of which $98,000 are expenses"; on 7 September he arranged the purchase of "seven larger frescoes for $49,000" [4]. These 32 Antiphonitis frescoes were shown with the Kanakaria mosaic of St Thaddeus in "The Lost Treasures of Cyprus" at the Haags Gemeentemuseum from 8 November 1997, and returned to Cyprus on 22 December 1997 [4]. The Church's payments in this operation are set out in the Munich seizure of 1997.

In October 1997 the Bavarian police raided Dikmen's flats in Munich. Rose records "two Antiphonitis frescoes" from the flats and "additional Antiphonitis frescoes" in a basement; among the pieces were sections of the Last Judgement and the Tree of Jesse [4; 6, p. 74]. These seized pieces did not come home at once. They were part of the stock claimed by the Church and the Republic in the German civil courts. The Byzantine Museum's catalogue records fragments of the Last Judgement, among them Abraham in Paradise, the archangel guarding Paradise and groups of the Righteous, and of the Tree of Jesse, as repatriated from Munich in November 2013, and further fragments in August 2015 [9].

The iconostasis icons in the Netherlands and Switzerland

The four apostle icons in the Netherlands were found in 1995. The Church obtained a pre-judgment attachment on 25 July 1995 and sued the collector in Rotterdam. On 4 February 1999 the District Court accepted that the icons had been in the Antiphonitis church until the Turkish occupation of July and August 1974, but dismissed the claim, holding that the 1954 Hague Protocol had no direct effect in Dutch law [5, pp. 341–343]. After the Netherlands enacted the Protocol in 2007, Cyprus requested the icons again and they were repatriated in September 2013 [10, p. 33]. The case is described in the Dutch icons.

A sixteenth-century icon of Christ Enthroned from the church was found in 2014 in the online catalogue of Schuler Auktionen in Zurich. Church officials assembled a file on its provenance and the icon was withdrawn from the sale; the Zurich public prosecutor handed it over on 7 July 2022 and it reached Cyprus the next day [12]. An icon of the Virgin holding the Child on a wooden throne, of the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century, came back earlier. Cyprus Post, which put it on a Christmas stamp in 2012, says it had been sold after 1974 to a private collector in Switzerland and was identified and repatriated when the collector lent it to an exhibition in 1998 [11].

The case against counting Antiphonitis as typical

The strongest objection to using Antiphonitis as evidence of the looting of the north is that it is exceptional. The church was remote, it held some of the best late medieval painting in the Kyrenia district, and its decoration had been photographed and published, so that its fragments were valuable and identifiable. Its story says a great deal about what happened to famous painted churches and little about the hundreds of village churches whose losses were never photographed. The objection is fair. The sources that describe Antiphonitis do not, for the most part, describe anything else, and the losses of smaller churches are known from lists rather than from recovered pieces.

The record also shows that the trade in Antiphonitis material was a buyers' market of a particular kind. The four icons were exhibited openly in Delft within two years of the invasion, and the Dutch courts first held that the buyer had acquired good title. The frescoes came home partly by purchase: the Church, through its intermediary, paid for the 32 pieces returned in 1997, and the rest came back through German civil proceedings that lasted until 2015. None of this concerns archaeological antiquities. It is church art, valued for its painting and sold to icon dealers and collectors, and it belongs with Kanakaria and Lysi, not with the pottery of Vounous or Salamis.

The church today

The church still stands, and parts of both series of paintings remain on its walls, damaged. The recovered fragments are in the Byzantine Museum of the Archbishop Makarios III Foundation in Nicosia [9]. No conservation of Antiphonitis itself has been published by the bicommunal Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage, whose programme with the United Nations Development Programme and European Union funding carried out emergency works at the church of Panagia Melandrina, also in the territory of Kalograia, from April 2013 to April 2014 [13].

What this means for an object on the market

A fresco fragment or icon that can be matched to Antiphonitis is church property and has been claimed whenever it has surfaced: in Rotterdam, Munich and Zurich. The matching rests on the photographs taken before 1974 and on the published descriptions of the paintings. A buyer offered a late medieval Cypriot wall painting, or an icon said to come from a church in the Kyrenia district, should expect it to be compared with that record. The case says nothing about Cypriot antiquities, which left the island through different channels and are documented in a different way; for those, see northern types with lawful histories.