Organised Looting in the Occupied North, 1977 to 1982

Between 1977 and 1982, in the words of the Council of Europe's rapporteur, the looting of the occupied north of Cyprus changed from "early opportunist raids" to "more organised looting of selected targets" [1, p. 131]. The targets were mainly churches. In these years the apse mosaic of the Panagia Kanakaria was cut from its wall, hundreds of icons gathered into a depot at Kyrenia Castle disappeared, and chests of icons were sent to Germany through Tymbou and Ankara airports. The sources attribute this work to a network with a Munich dealer, Aydın Dikmen, at one end and a Turkish Cypriot "local boss" at the other. Antiquities were seized in the same years too, but the archaeological cases are small: batches of 8 to 18 pieces sold by a dealer to visitors and stopped at the airport, one of them for DM 1,000. This entry sets out what was organised and what was not, and why the period is usually closed in 1982.

What the Council of Europe's phrase describes

The phrase comes from the Information Memorandum on the cultural heritage of Cyprus presented on 2 July 1989 by Ymenus van der Werff, general rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, after a visit to the island. It stands in his section 5.1, "Damage to immovable cultural property": "Most of this damage has occurred in the north and is the result of looting. It is difficult to say that this was professionally done (though the removal of the Kanakaria mosaics was certainly an acrobatic feat) but it was evidently linked to the highly professional international market in illegally exported art. 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 "selected targets" are therefore buildings and their fixed decoration: mosaics and wall paintings, with the icons that hung in the same churches. The memorandum does not apply the phrase to tombs, sites or museum stores, and it gives no dates other than the two that bound the period. Its dating is an estimate made in 1989 from the cases then known. Applying it to archaeological looting is an inference from the fact that the Turkish Cypriot seizures of antiquities fall in the same years, and the memorandum itself does not make it.

The network as the sources describe it

The fullest description of who did the work comes from the Turkish journalist Özgen Acar, whose series in Cumhuriyet in May 1989 drew on an inquiry of the Turkish Cypriot assembly and on the Turkish Cypriot press. Samuel Hardy has set out Acar's account, with its Turkish role-names, in a study of organised crime in the antiquities trade [2, pp. 127-130]. In it the "International Boss" was Aydın Dikmen, a Turkish dealer based in Munich, and the "Local Boss" was "Tremeşeli" Mehmet Ali İlkman, a former fighter of the Turkish Cypriot paramilitary organisation TMT and later an agent of the Turkish intelligence service, whom Acar called "impossible" for the police to touch until 1989 [2, p. 129]. Below them Acar placed a "Director", a "Remover" and a "Lookout", and around them a circle of associates that included the mayor of Morphou and the director of the Kyrenia museum [2, p. 130].

Hardy lists the places from which, on these sources, the network took material: wall paintings from the Armenian church in Nicosia, the Panagia Pergaminiotissa at Akanthou, Ayios Yeorgios at Kalo Chorio Kapouti, Christ Antiphonitis, Ayia Solomoni at Koma tou Yialou, Ayios Euphemianos at Lysi and the Panagia Apsidiotissa at Synchari; the mosaics of the Panagia Kanakaria; icons from churches at Kalo Chorio, Koutsovendis, Paleosofos and Trikomo and from Kyrenia Castle; and icons, human remains and a bible from Ayios Mamas at Morphou [2, pp. 128-129]. Every entry on the list is church property, apart from a sword from the Selimiye Mosque in Nicosia. No tomb, cemetery or excavation store is named.

The legal record is thinner than the description. It is summarised here because guilt is easily implied by the word "network".

Dikmen was never convicted of anything; claims to the contrary made in the Turkish Cypriot assembly in 1997 were denied by his lawyer, and no record of a conviction has been published [2, p. 127]. What links him to the north is the stock found in his Munich flats in 1997 and returned to Cyprus through civil proceedings, which is treated in the Munich seizure of 1997.

Kanakaria, 1976 to 1979

The best-known removal of the period is the sixth-century apse mosaic of the Panagia Kanakaria at Lythrankomi in the Karpas. The court in Indianapolis found that it was removed "at some point between 1976 and 1979" [4]. In 1988 four fragments were sold in Geneva to an Indianapolis dealer for $1.08 million, and in 1989 the court ordered their return to the Church of Cyprus, a decision affirmed on appeal in 1990 [4]. The removal window opens before van der Werff's period and closes inside it. The case is set out in the Kanakaria mosaics.

The Kyrenia Castle depot and the Ankara chests, 1981

After 1974 the Turkish Cypriot antiquities department gathered icons from churches into Kyrenia Castle. Olay reported that 225 icons brought there from Lambousa, the Metropolis of Morphou and Larnaka tis Lapithou were found to be missing in 1981, that a commission wrote a 40-page report, and that the branch director was removed and put on trial [3, p. 144]. At the hearings a handwriting expert said the alterations to the inventory were in the director's hand, and archaeologists of the department testified that numbers on the backs of the icons had been changed [3, p. 151]. Hofstadter records that he was not convicted [5, p. 213]. The depot is described in the Kyrenia Castle icon depot.

On 16 March 1981 three chests labelled "personal property" were sent through Tymbou to an address in Germany and opened at Ankara airport. Olay counted "158 antiques", among them icons sawn into four to six pieces, with items from the Kyrenia Castle and St Barnabas inventories; it described the find as proof "beyond doubt" of "the icon robbery and antique smuggling which has been going on for years" [3, pp. 143-144]. The count cannot be divided between icons and archaeological objects from the published account. The seizure shows icons leaving by the route that antiquities also used, although the objects identified in the chests are icons, and it is treated in the Ankara airport seizure of 1981.

The antiquities seizures of 1980 to 1982

The archaeological record of these years comes almost entirely from Olay's series "Perishing Cyprus", published in four instalments from 26 April 1982 by the Turkish Cypriot journalist Mehmet Yaşın. It quotes official letters of the north's own antiquities department, and most of its cases concern the mayor of Morphou, whose shop had been raided in 1975 (see the Morphou mayor's shop). Olay names the buyers; they were private visitors, and they are described here by role.

The printed translation dates the tourist's purchase to 6 November 1982, which cannot be right for a series that began in April 1982; it is probably 1981. The prices and quantities are the point of the table. Eighteen pieces for DM 1,000 is a retail sale to a visitor, not a consignment to an international dealer. Gastria was development damage that smugglers exploited, not a planned removal. Nothing in these cases resembles the organisation that removed a wall mosaic or emptied a depot of icons.

Why the systematic part was church art

The difference between the two trades follows from the objects. A sixth-century mosaic or a set of frescoes was unique, published and worth a great deal: the four Kanakaria fragments alone sold for $1.08 million in 1988 [4]. It needed specialists to remove it, a buyer in western Europe or America, and the time to wait for one; the Kanakaria fragments were not sold until 1988, nine years or more after their removal. A Bronze Age pot from a northern tomb was one of tens of thousands of similar pots already in museums and on the market, much of it exported lawfully before 1974, and worth little; Fehlmann writes that Red Polished pottery "rarely costs more than a couple of hundred pounds sterling a piece" [6, p. 158]. Organisation paid in church art. In archaeology it was not needed, and the documented sales were local and small. The comparison of the two trades, and the ways later figures have merged them, is in church art and antiquities.

The evidence for organised archaeological looting

The strongest evidence against reading the period as church art alone comes from inside the north. Olay described illegal digging in 1982 as widespread: tombs "protected before 1974" along the road from Ayios Sergios to St Barnabas "now looted and robbed", an illegal dig zone "as large as the area covering the north and southwest of Salamis", and dealers with "a contactman in every region" and "men" who dug for them, protected by "distinguished" people at the top [3, p. 143]. It also wrote that figurines from the archaeological museum at Varosha had been "stolen and smuggled to London" [3, p. 139]. Fehlmann, who rejects the Republic's figures, accepts that "well-informed gangs regularly plunder archaeological remains in the North" and "are rarely caught" [6, pp. 161-162]. Icons and antiquities left by the same routes, and Dikmen's stock in 1997 included prehistoric material.

That evidence shows that digging was organised locally, through dealers and their diggers, and that the same people could handle icons and antiquities. It does not show a campaign against the northern cemeteries on the scale of the church removals, and no dated case from these years records a large archaeological consignment. The figures for what was taken are weighed in how much was taken.

Why the period closes in 1982

Van der Werff gives no reason for ending his period in 1982, and none of the sources states one. The record shows several changes in 1981 and 1982 that coincide with the end of the window. The Ankara seizure of March 1981 exposed the route through Tymbou, and the loss of the Kyrenia icons led to an inquiry and a trial that opened in the spring of 1982 [3, pp. 144, 151]. An investigating committee of the Turkish Cypriot assembly had reported in 1981, naming collectors who worked with foreigners [3, p. 150]. Olay published its series from April 1982, and in May it reported that Dikmen had been "arrested in Kyrenia by security officials" [3, p. 152]; he was soon released [2, p. 128]. By then, too, the most valuable fixed decoration had already been taken from the best-known churches.

What ended in 1982, on this record, was the period of removals, not the trade. The Lysi frescoes were offered in Munich in 1983, the Kanakaria fragments were sold in 1988, and Dikmen's Munich stock was seized only in 1997. That later history is in the decline after 1997.

Lawful export and buying in the same years

In the Republic, licensed export of registered antiquities continued throughout. Licence numbers reached 7070 in January 1978, and a single permit of that year covered a whole private collection of 62 objects, 32 of which are now in Leipzig [8]. From 1979 the A. G. Leventis Foundation bought Cypriot antiquities on the London market for the Cyprus Museum, choosing "only items which could not be identified as belonging to a specific museum or collection" [7, pp. 11, 62], and in 1981 it bought from their owner the Hadjiprodromou picrolites that had been recovered from the trade [7, p. 54]. The state and its partners were buyers in the same market in which loot from the north was offered, and the Foundation stated that objects with a known provenance were claimed through Interpol and other official channels instead [7, p. 11].

What this means for an object on the market today

The organised removals of 1977 to 1982 were removals of church art, and the objects are unique, photographed before they were taken, and claimed by the Church of Cyprus wherever they appear. An icon, a fresco fragment or a mosaic from a church in the north has no lawful export history, and its place is the subject of the church-art entries of this section. The antiquities of the same years are different. The few that can be identified carry the marks of registered collections, such as the "OHL" of the Hadjiloizides collection. An undocumented Bronze Age pot of a northern type cannot be tied to these years by its type alone, and the published record of 1977 to 1982 contains no seizure that would make it likely.

The photograph at the head of this entry shows the twelfth-century church of the Panagia Pergaminiotissa near Akanthou, one of the churches whose wall paintings the sources list among the network's thefts (photo: Amanda Slater, cropped, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons).