The Lysi Frescoes: Bought to Be Returned

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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 wall paintings of a small chapel near Lysi, in the Mesaoria in the occupied north of Cyprus, were the first major work of church art from the north to appear on the market after the Turkish invasion of 1974 [1, p. 304; 3, p. 463]. They were offered in Munich in 1983, cut into 38 pieces and with a false history. The Menil Foundation of Houston found out where they came from, obtained the consent of the Church of Cyprus, which owned them, and the Department of Antiquities, and bought them from the seller. It then restored them, kept them as custodian under an agreement with the Church, built a chapel to show them, and returned them to Cyprus in 2012. The case is the best-known instance of a purchase made in order to recover stolen church art, and the photograph above, of the chapel's dome as it now stands without its paintings, shows what was taken (photo: Pavloscy, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons).

The chapel and its paintings

The chapel stands outside the village of Lysi, in the Mesaoria plain east of Nicosia. Its saint is given in two forms: Ayios Themonianos, the name used by Thomas Kline and by Archbishop Chrysostomos I, and St Euphemianos (Evphemianos), used by Patty Gerstenblith and Glenn Peers [3, p. 463; 2; 7, p. 357]. Both names refer to the same building and the same paintings, so the "Ayios Euphemianos frescoes" and the "Lysi frescoes" are one case, not two. Derek Fincham spells it St Themanianos [1, p. 303].

The paintings are of the thirteenth century, in the medieval period of the island's art [1, p. 301]. In the dome, Christ Pantokrator was surrounded by twelve angels; in the apse were the Virgin and St John the Baptist [1, p. 301]. Kline notes that photographs of 1972 show the Pantokrator in place in the church [3, p. 463]. When the conservator Laurence Morrocco later visited the chapel he found it whitewashed except where the paintings had been, with "small pieces of the fresco" lying "amidst dirt, straw, and sheep droppings" [1, p. 306]. The published accounts do not date the removal; it happened after 1974 and before the fragments were offered for sale in 1983.

The offer in Munich, 1983

In 1983 a London dealer showed black-and-white photographs of the fragments to Bertrand Davezac, the first director of the Menil, and then arranged a meeting in Munich. Dominique de Menil and her colleagues saw the pieces by candlelight in a run-down flat whose electricity was off [1, p. 306]. She later said they were "too much chopped up to derive any impression of beauty" [1, p. 306]. The seller was Aydın Dikmen, a Turkish dealer living in Munich, who told them that a contractor in southern Anatolia had found the paintings under rubble in a derelict church, and who showed freehand drawings of a church and a forged Turkish export permit [1, pp. 305–306]. Dikmen was never convicted of anything. According to Kline, the seller would not let his identity be revealed to Cyprus and threatened to sell to other buyers if the Menil did not buy [3, p. 463]. De Menil paid a small sum for the right to acquire the paintings later [1, p. 306].

The Indiana court that heard the Kanakaria case summarised the same events from depositions given by Menil staff: the frescoes were said to be from Turkey, the London dealer came to suspect that a mosaic seen in Dikmen's flat belonged to the Panagia Kanakaria, and that suspicion made the Menil ask whether the frescoes too came from Cyprus [5]. The mosaic pieces then returned to Cyprus by a separate route, set out on the page on the Kanakaria mosaics.

Finding the owner

De Menil engaged Herbert Brownell, a former United States Attorney General, to handle the acquisition. Brownell warned her of "the uncertain state of the law applying to the purchase of art from a dealer who could not establish a credible provenance", and pointed to the UNESCO Convention of 1970 [1, p. 306]. He sent a letter with photographs of the murals to nine countries that had been part of the Byzantine Empire, inviting any claim. Turkey, Lebanon and Cyprus replied, "but only Cyprus provided documentary evidence of the location" of the chapel [1, pp. 306–307]. Fincham treats this as a model of diligent inquiry for its time, "far more aggressive and targeted than was the norm" in 1983 [1, p. 309].

With the owner identified, de Menil had to choose between alerting the police in Germany, Cyprus or the United States and buying the paintings. She judged that Dikmen would sell the pieces at once, or destroy them, if he feared arrest [1, p. 307]. Andreas Jacovides, Cyprus's ambassador in Washington, described the same choice from the Cypriot side: "We faced the difficult decision of whether to say, 'Wait, it's stolen property' (in which case we would run the risk of having the frescoes go underground) or making some kind of arrangement ... It was felt at the time that it would be better, for the sake of preserving the frescoes, to have the arrangement" [1, p. 307].

The purchase and the agreement with the Church

Before buying, de Menil obtained the assent of the Department of Antiquities and of the Autocephalous Church of Cyprus [1, p. 307]. The price, Fincham writes, "was near $520,000" [1, p. 307]. Mark Rose, writing in 1998, reported that the paintings had been offered to the Foundation for $850,000 and that "the final price has not been disclosed" [4]. The fragments went from Munich to London in January 1984 [1, p. 307]. The Seventh Circuit dated the Menil's acquisition from Dikmen to 1984 [6]; the district court described it as made "for the Church of Cyprus" under an agreement that let the Menil exhibit the frescoes for a period before returning them [5].

The formal agreement followed a series of negotiations. In 1987 the Church and the Menil agreed that the Foundation would act as custodian for an initial fifteen years and would in return conserve the murals and display them in Houston [1, p. 307]. Ownership never passed: in a letter of 1989 Dominique de Menil described the Church of Cyprus as the body "which owns forever the frescoes", and called the agreement "an innovation in museum policy" because the fragments were treated "not only as antiquities" but "also as relics" [2].

Conservation and the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, 1997 to 2012

The murals had been cut into 38 pieces, 26 of them from the dome [1, p. 308]. They had been faced with cloth crudely glued on for transport, and when Morrocco first examined them in London in 1984 he found that "the original curvature had been lost. We had no measurements except ... the dubious ones supplied by the smugglers" [1, p. 308]. He reassembled the dome without seeing the chapel for most of the work [1, p. 308]. Fincham puts the cost of the restoration at an estimated 500,000 [1, p. 308]; Rose gave "about $1 million, according to Cypriot sources" [4].

The Menil then built a pavilion for the paintings, a few hundred yards from the Rothko Chapel, at a cost of $3 million [1, p. 308]. It was designed by François de Menil and opened in 1997 [2]. Inside a darkened room an outline of the Lysi chapel in frosted glass held the dome and apse in their original relation, and the building was consecrated and open for worship [1, p. 308; 2]. It was known as the Byzantine Fresco Chapel. Archbishop Chrysostomos I wrote to the Foundation in October 1997 that he considered the Church "lucky, in that frescoes from Saint Themonianos ended up in your Foundation and that you built that wonderful Chapel to host them", and asked that the chapel remind visitors that "in the occupied areas churches are looted and sacred vessels are stolen" [2].

The return to Cyprus, 2012

The paintings stayed in Houston for fifteen years, the term of the original agreement [1, p. 308]. They left in March 2012 [2; 3, p. 463] and went on display in the Byzantine Museum of the Archbishop Makarios III Foundation in Nicosia [1, p. 309; 2]. The Houston building now carries a sign recording the end of the loan and houses other installations [1, p. 309]. Kline, who acted for Cyprus in the Kanakaria case but not in this one, wrote that the Church and the Menil "are to be applauded for this unusual and innovative arrangement" [3, p. 463]. Peers regretted the loss of a teaching resource and noted that the paintings "are not going to their real home, only another museum setting", since the chapel at Lysi remains in the occupied north [2].

The case against buying to recover

The strongest objection to the arrangement is that it paid the man who sold stolen church art. Fincham states it directly: de Menil "decided to pay the head of this looting network, Dikmen, knowing perhaps that he would continue looting and pillaging other sites and rural churches in Cyprus and Turkey" [1, p. 307]. The Kanakaria sale of 1988 and the Munich seizure of 1997 show that his business did continue. Fincham adds that the Menil was not as careful in all its purchases: some fragments of a mosaic looted at Zeugma in Turkey, acquired by the Menil, were later returned to Turkey [1, p. 309]. The payment, about $520,000, was also of a different order from anything paid for archaeological material from the north.

Against that, the owner consented. The Church of Cyprus and the Department of Antiquities agreed to the purchase, ownership stayed with the Church throughout, and the alternative described by both the Menil and the Cypriot ambassador was the disappearance of the paintings into the market [1, p. 307]. Purchases made to recover stolen pieces became a regular practice of the Church and the Republic; they are listed, with the buyers' stated reasons, in the state as buyer.

What the case means for an object on the market today

The Lysi case shows what a check of title can achieve when a church has been published or photographed before 1974: a letter with photographs to the possible claimant states settled the question. A buyer offered a fresco fragment, mosaic or icon said to come from the eastern Mediterranean can still do what Brownell did, and the Church of Cyprus and the Department of Antiquities can compare it with their records. A purchase of church art from Cyprus made without the owner's consent gives no title, as the Indiana courts held in the Kanakaria case, and the Menil arrangement worked only because the owner agreed to it in advance. The wider account of what was taken from the churches of the north and what has come back is in looting in occupied northern Cyprus.