Church Art in the Occupied North after 1974: Churches, Icons, Mosaics and Frescoes

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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.

The photograph at the head of this page shows a desecrated chapel on the Karpas peninsula near Akanthou, in the occupied north, in 2016 (photo: Julian Nyča, cropped, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons). The wooden or stone screen in front of the sanctuary still stands, but the frames that held its icons are empty. After the Turkish invasion of 1974 the Greek Orthodox, Maronite and Armenian congregations of the north were forced south, and their churches were left without priests, wardens or locks. Some were turned into mosques, museums, stores or barns; many were stripped. Their icons, wall paintings and mosaics are church art of the Byzantine and later periods. They were made for worship, recorded in church inventories and, in the best-known cases, photographed and published before they were taken. They are counted here apart from archaeological antiquities, and the case pages in this group follow each theft from the church to the court and, where it happened, back to Cyprus. This page is the summary of the group: the number of churches, the icon depots, the named churches stripped, the Munich seizure of 1997, the court cases, the returns and the Church's payments.

The churches of the north and what happened to them

No full inventory of the churches of the occupied north has been published by both sides together, and the figures in print are estimates that count different things. Sophocles Hadjisavvas, a former Director of the Department of Antiquities, wrote in 2015 that "some 500 churches have been ill-treated, while others have been deliberately destroyed", citing Charalampos Chotzakoglou's survey of 2008 [1, p. 130]. The Cyprus Ministry of Foreign Affairs put the figure higher: "more than 550 Greek Orthodox churches and religious buildings have been pillaged or destroyed", with churches "converted to mosques, storehouses, and even barns" [2]. Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert and Alexandra Bounia, writing on the museums of the island, give "about 500 Byzantine and post-Byzantine churches" as the total that the Turkish Cypriot authorities found themselves managing after 1974, and note that five of them were turned into icon museums [3, p. 65]. The first count is of churches damaged, the second of churches and other religious buildings damaged, and the third of churches in the area as a whole, so the three do not contradict one another as much as they appear to.

The first outside observer could see little. Jacques Dalibard, a Canadian restoration architect appointed adviser to UNESCO, inspected sites on both sides in 1975, but in the occupied area "newly pillaged sites, such as the monastery of Antiphonitis, could not be inspected", and his report was never published [1, p. 131]. In 1989 Ymenus van der Werff, general rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, set out the pattern that every later account follows: "After early opportunist raids during the unsettled period following 1974, more organised looting of selected targets seems to have taken place between 1977 and 1982" [1, p. 131]. The years before and after that window are covered in opportunist raids, 1974 to 1977, organised looting, 1977 to 1982 and the decline after 1997.

How many icons and wall paintings were taken

The estimates for portable church art are larger and less certain than the counts of churches. Mark Rose, reporting for Archaeology in 1998 after the Munich seizure, gave "an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 icons, and thousands of chalices, wood carvings, crucifixes, and bibles" [4]. Hadjisavvas, at a Cambridge symposium in 1999, gave "perhaps another 16,000 icons and mosaics stolen from churches", separately from his figure for ancient artefacts [5, p. 29]. Farid Mirbagheri's historical dictionary has "some 20,000 icons and dozens of frescoes" sold internationally [7, p. 73]. In 2024 the director of the Cyprus Police office for antiquities trafficking spoke of "over 16,000 Christian icons, mosaics and murals" [6]. None of these figures comes with a published method. They are the claims of the owner and its officials, and they are best read as an order of magnitude: thousands of icons, not hundreds and not hundreds of thousands. How they relate to the separate figure of 60,000 ancient artefacts is set out in how much was taken.

Icons gathered into depots

Not every icon was taken from its church by a thief. After 1974 the Turkish Cypriot antiquities department moved icons from many churches into stores, and the stores became one of the sources of the trade. At Kyrenia the castle served as a depot for icons from the churches of Lambousa, the Metropolis of Morphou and Larnaka tis Lapithou. In June 1981, after a smuggled consignment was opened at Ankara airport, an inquiry found that 225 icons brought to the castle were missing, the inventories had been altered and pages were gone, and the director of the Kyrenia branch was removed and put on trial in 1982 [8, p. 144]. Dan Hofstadter records that he was not convicted [9, p. 213]. Hadjisavvas wrote in 2015 that thousands of icons taken from churches across the occupied area "are now stored in damp and salty environments, such as the medieval galleries of the Kyrenia Museum right on the sea" [1, p. 130]. The case is set out in the Kyrenia Castle icon depot. The monastery of St Barnabas near Salamis, now an icon and archaeological museum, lost icons in the same period (St Barnabas icons), and the consignment that exposed both thefts is described in the Ankara airport seizure of 1981.

Mosaics and frescoes cut from named churches

The thefts that reached the courts were of decoration cut from church walls, because those pieces were unique and photographed, and could be identified wherever they surfaced.

Panagia Kanakaria, Lythrankomi. The apse mosaic of about AD 500, the Virgin and Child with archangels and a border of apostle medallions, had been published by A. H. S. Megaw and E. J. W. Hawkins for Dumbarton Oaks in 1977. The village's congregation left in 1976, and the mosaic was prised from the wall between 1976 and 1979 [10, p. 234]. Four fragments, the Christ, an archangel and the medallions of St James and St Matthew, were sold in Geneva in July 1988 to an Indianapolis dealer [9, p. 63]. Other fragments came back separately between 1983 and 2018. See the Kanakaria mosaics.

Ayios Themonianos, Lysi. The thirteenth-century paintings of the dome and apse of a small chapel near Lysi, Christ Pantokrator among angels with the Virgin and St John the Baptist, were cut into 38 pieces [2]. The chapel's dedication is given in two forms: Hadjisavvas calls it Agios Euphemianos [1, p. 130], Fincham the church of Themanianos [2], and both refer to the same building. See the Lysi frescoes.

Christ Antiphonitis, Kalogrea. The twelfth-century church of a former monastery in the Kyrenia range lost its wall paintings in two stages: frescoes were cut out first, and a later attempt brought down a section of wall and destroyed the painting on it [7, pp. 73–74]. Its Last Judgement and Tree of Jesse were among the pieces found in Munich in 1997 [7, p. 74], and four sixteenth-century icons from its screen went to the Netherlands. See Antiphonitis.

Other churches. Two fragments of the twelfth-century wall paintings of the Panagia Apsinthiotissa near Kyrenia, acquired by a Canadian collector on the market and donated by him, were shown at the House of Lords in London in December 2014 [1, p. 133]. The wall paintings of Ayios Yeorgios at Kalo Chorio (Kapouti) were returned in exchange for a member of the network being released from custody, according to the Turkish journalist Özgen Acar as summarised by Samuel Hardy [16]. See Ayios Yeorgios, Kalo Chorio.

The Munich seizure of 1997

Most of the cut decoration passed through Munich, where the Turkish dealer Aydın Dikmen, who was never convicted of anything, kept a stock in apartments. In October 1997 the Bavarian police, with the Dutch dealer Michel van Rijn acting as intermediary, arrested Dikmen and seized several thousand objects, among them Cypriot icons, frescoes and mosaics [4]. The Church of Cyprus and the Republic then sued in the German civil courts for the Cypriot pieces. By Hadjisavvas's account the Munich Court of Appeal decided on 18 March 2014 to return 173 of the 246 objects seized and asked for more proof of ownership for the rest [1, p. 138]. The Cyprus Mail dates the return of the 173 to July 2013 [6], and the two sources disagree on the year. A second group followed in August 2015: 85 objects according to the Cyprus Mail [6], while Efthymia Alphas of the Department of Antiquities gives 207 ecclesiastical and prehistoric objects for the returns of 2013 and 2015 together [13, p. 36], which leaves 34 for 2015. The last 60, "24 ecclesiastical relics and 36 prehistoric and other antiquities", came under a repatriation agreement announced on 11 June 2024 [6]. That final group is the clearest sign that the same stock held church art and ancient objects together. The seizure and the litigation are described in the Munich seizure of 1997.

The court cases

Indianapolis, 1989 to 1991. The Church and the Republic sued the Indianapolis buyer of the four Kanakaria fragments in replevin. On 3 August 1989 the federal court in Indiana ordered the mosaics delivered to the Church; it found that they had been removed during the occupation without the Church's consent, that the Church had not abandoned the building, and that a thief cannot pass title under Indiana law [11]. The Seventh Circuit affirmed in 1990 [11], the Supreme Court refused to hear a further appeal, and the fragments returned to Cyprus in 1991. Anne Sullivan sets out how the court handled limitation and good faith [10, pp. 236–238].

The Netherlands, 1995 to 2013. The four Antiphonitis icons, of St Peter, St Paul, St John and St Mark, had been bought by an elderly Dutch couple between 1975 and 1977 and were recognised in 1995 when the couple tried to sell them through Christie's. The Church's claim failed in 2002 after seven years in the Dutch courts. After the Netherlands passed a law in 2007 on cultural goods from occupied territories, Cyprus asked for them under it, and the Dutch government handed them over in The Hague in September 2013 [14]. See the Dutch icons.

Germany, 2004 to 2024. The civil claim against Dikmen for the Munich stock ran for two decades, through the appeal decisions summarised above, to the negotiated agreement of 2024 [1, p. 138; 6].

The returns

The Lysi paintings came back by a different route. In 1983 and 1984 the Menil Foundation of Houston bought them from Dikmen for about $520,000, after obtaining the assent of the Church of Cyprus, which held title, and of the Department of Antiquities [2]. They were conserved and shown in Houston under a custody agreement with the Church and returned to Cyprus in March 2012 [12, p. 463]. Most of the returned pieces are now in the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia, which shows seven fragments of the Kanakaria mosaic and 36 fragments of the Antiphonitis frescoes [7, p. 88].

The Church's payments

The Church of Cyprus paid for much of this. For the operation that led to the Munich seizure, Rose reported that the Church provided the equivalent of about $500,000 in 1997, from which the intermediary was paid for the Kanakaria St Thaddeus medallion and for two groups of Antiphonitis frescoes [15]. The 2018 returns of St Andrew and St Mark were described as the repayment of expenses and a fee for storage and restoration. Those payments, with the buyer's own stated reasons and the debate over them, are set out in the state as buyer.

The evidence against treating church art as a separate trade

The case for counting church art apart rests on its different objects, buyers and prices, and the record supports it. The strongest evidence on the other side is that the two kinds of object were often moved by the same hands. The consignment opened at Ankara in 1981 was described by Olay as proof of "the icon robbery and antique smuggling" together, although the objects it identifies in the chests are icons [8, p. 143]. The final Munich return of 2024 was 36 ancient objects to 24 pieces of church art [6]. A network built to strip churches could and did carry pottery and figurines as well. The page on church art and antiquities sets out where the line holds and where it does not.

A second objection concerns the payments. Hardy argues that buying back church art "creates a market for antiquities that can be 'rescued'", and that the "publicly documented, 'portableised' artworks from churches in Cyprus" could not have been sold to private collectors and "were stolen in order to be ransomed back to the Republic of Cyprus" [17, p. 17]. On church art the argument has weight: a photographed, published mosaic has no lawful buyer except its owner. It applies much less to ordinary ancient pottery, which has a large lawful supply.

A third point concerns the depots. The Turkish Cypriot antiquities department gathered icons from abandoned churches into castle galleries and monasteries, and later opened icon museums, as a measure of protection [3, p. 65]. The Kyrenia depot shows that the measure could itself become a source of loss; the inquiry that exposed it in 1981 was carried out by Turkish Cypriot officials, the antiquities department among them [8, p. 144].

What this means for church art on the market today

An icon, fresco fragment or piece of mosaic of Cypriot origin offered for sale today is judged differently from an ancient pot. Church art from the north was recorded in church inventories, in the Department of Antiquities' photographs and in publications such as the Dumbarton Oaks monograph on Kanakaria, and the Church of Cyprus and the Cyprus Police continue to claim it at auction. A post-Byzantine icon with a documented history abroad before 1974 has a different standing from one that first appears after it, and an inscription naming a northern village or church is a reason to ask for the full history before anything else. The papers that establish such a history are described in collecting Cypriot antiquities today.