Ayios Yeorgios at Kalo Chorio (Kapouti): Wall Paintings Stolen and Handed Back in the North

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This page 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.

Kalo Chorio is a village on the plain east of Morphou, in the Nicosia district, known as Kalo Chorio Kapouti or Kalo Chorio Morphou to distinguish it from the other villages of the same name, and in Turkish as Kalkanlı. Its population was Greek Cypriot before the Turkish invasion of 1974, after which it was in the occupied north. The church of Ayios Yeorgios in the village lost its wall paintings and its icons after 1974. The case is known from a few sentences, but they are unusual: by the account published in the Turkish press, the paintings were recovered inside the north, and a man held by the police was released in return for them. The photograph at the head of this page shows the apse of the church in 2024.

What the record says

The fullest statement is in Samuel Hardy's study of organised trafficking from Turkey, which draws on a series of articles on the antiquities trade in the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet in May 1989 and on other sources. Hardy lists the church twice among the works taken from at least fifty churches and institutions in the occupied north by the network he associates with Aydın Dikmen: "wall paintings from ... the Church of Ayios Yeorgios in Kalo Chorio Kapouti", and "icons from the Church of Ayios Yeorgios in Kalo Chorio Kapouti" [1, p. 129]. Dikmen was never convicted of anything, and the attribution of this theft to his network is Hardy's and his sources'.

The Cumhuriyet series described the network in tiers, with Turkish role-names. Two of the men it names are connected with this church. The man it calls the network's "Director [Yönlendirici]" "was released from police custody in return for the release of the wall paintings that had been stolen from the Church of Ayios Yeorgios", and the man it calls its "Lookout [Erkete]", a retired police officer, "was briefly imprisoned for the theft of the wall paintings from the Church of Ayios Yeorgios" [1, p. 130]. The custody and the imprisonment were in the north, under the Turkish Cypriot authorities.

What this account implies

If the report is accurate, the wall paintings of Ayios Yeorgios were among the few pieces of church art from the north to be recovered by the Turkish Cypriot authorities themselves, as the icons from St Barnabas found in a house at Kythrea and in the Ankara chests of 1981 were (see St Barnabas icons and the Ankara airport seizure of 1981). It also implies that the recovery was negotiated: the paintings were returned in exchange for a suspect's freedom, not seized and prosecuted.

What is not known

The published record leaves most of the case open:

• The paintings. No description of the wall paintings has been published: their subjects, their date, their size or how they were removed.
• The date. The theft is not dated in the sources. It was reported in 1989.
• Where the paintings are now. Who received the paintings when they were handed back, and where they were kept, is not recorded. No piece from the church has been publicly identified among the church art returned to the Republic from Munich or elsewhere.
• The icons. Nothing is published on what the icons were or whether any were recovered.

A list of damaged churches submitted to the United States Helsinki Commission in 1985 by Father Evagoras Constantinides names "the church at Kapouti", citing the Turkish Cypriot newspaper Ortam of 20 January 1983 as confirmation [2, p. 53]. The entry does not name the church, and Kapouti is also the name of a separate village, so it cannot be taken as a reference to Ayios Yeorgios at Kalo Chorio.

The building today

The church stands. Photographs taken in October 2024 show its interior fitted out as a mosque [3]. Whether any painted plaster survives under later finishes has not been published.

The evidence against reading this as a large loss

The evidence for this case is a single published account, at second hand, of a Turkish newspaper series written in 1989, more than a decade after the events it describes. It gives no inventory and no date. A short entry is all that it supports. It is not evidence of the scale of looting in the Morphou district, and it says nothing about archaeological antiquities, which are counted separately; for the lawful export of ancient objects from the north before 1974, see northern types with lawful histories.

What this means for an object on the market

Without a description or photographs of the wall paintings of Ayios Yeorgios, a fragment from this church could not be recognised on the market by its appearance. The Church of Cyprus treats wall paintings taken from its churches as its property wherever they are found, and a fragment said to come from a church of the Morphou district should be referred to the Church and the Department of Antiquities before purchase. The church-art cases from the north that could be proved in court, at Kanakaria, Lysi and Antiphonitis, were the ones photographed and published before 1974.