The Ankara Airport Seizure of 1981: Three Chests from the Occupied North

On 16 March 1981 three chests labelled "personal property" were sent from Tymbou, the airport of the occupied north of Cyprus now called Ercan, to an address in Germany. They were opened at Ankara airport. Inside were 158 objects, among them icons that had been sawn into four to six pieces, and some of the objects carried the inventory entries of the Kyrenia castle depot and of the monastery of St Barnabas near Salamis. The only detailed published account is a Turkish Cypriot one: the second instalment of Mehmet Yaşın's series "Perishing Cyprus" in the Nicosia weekly Olay, 3 May 1982, later printed in English translation in the record of a United States Congress hearing [1, pp. 143–144]. Everything on this page rests on that account. It is often cited as the case in which icons and archaeological antiquities travelled together. Read closely, it shows less than that, and what it does show is set out below.

What Olay reported

Olay introduced the case as the proof of a long-running trade: "The icon robbery and antique smuggling which has been going on for years, was proved beyond doubt by the discovery of 158 antiques in Ankara airport." It put the value at "tens of millions of Turkish Lira" [1, p. 143]. The chests had gone from Tymbou to Ankara on the way to Germany; Turkey was then the only country with regular air and sea links to the occupied north, so most traffic out of it passed through Turkey first [4, p. 362]. The paper said that "icons placed in 3 chests and labelled 'personal property' were being smuggled out to Germany through Tymbou and Ankara airport", and that the discovery revealed earlier consignments: "antiques were smuggled out to the same address under the label 'personal property'". The police knew the address and it had been published in the newspapers, "Yet, so far, the question as to who was residing at this address in Germany and with whom this man had relations, has remained unanswered" [1, pp. 143–144].

Olay named the Turkish Cypriot man who had dispatched the chests. It reported rumours that he was the thief, said that "there was no sufficient evidence regarding this issue", and added that soldiers had once detained him while he was digging in the churchyard of Ayios Amvrosios [1, p. 144]. No court case against him is recorded, and on the record he stands accused of nothing beyond sending the chests.

The objects traced to Kyrenia and St Barnabas

The seized objects were "handed over to the authorities in Cyprus on May 29, 1981", that is, to the Turkish Cypriot authorities, and when they were checked against the registers "it was found that the antiques listed in the Kyrenia Castle and St. Barnabas inventories were also amongst them" [1, p. 144]. The check opened the wider inquiry. The comptroller general, the security services and the Turkish Cypriot antiquities department found that 225 icons brought for safekeeping to Kyrenia castle from Lambousa, the Metropolis of Morphou and Larnaka tis Lapithou were missing; a commission wrote a 40-page report; and the official in charge of the Kyrenia branch was removed and put on trial in the spring of 1982 [1, p. 144]. That story belongs to the Kyrenia castle icon depot.

For St Barnabas Olay gave figures. Thirty-five icons had been stolen from the monastery church, including the small and very valuable icons on the iconostasis; large icons sawn into four to six pieces were used to fill the gaps. The theft took place while the night-watchman was in the building. Eleven icons were later found in an abandoned house at Kythrea, "and 11 more were found amongst the antiques which were smuggled through Ankara airport to Germany. The others are still missing or were sold by the smuggler's partners in Germany" [1, p. 144]. In an interview printed a week later the Turkish Cypriot director of antiquities said that the theft "occurred when the guard was not there" and that "80% of the icons were found" [1, p. 149]. The two statements do not agree: 22 of 35 is 63 per cent. The St Barnabas losses are the subject of St Barnabas icons.

Icons, antiquities and a count that cannot be split

The chests are usually described as mixed, icons and archaeological objects together, and the count of 158 is quoted as "antiquities". The English text of Olay uses "antiques" for everything: the 11 St Barnabas icons are counted "amongst the antiques" smuggled through Ankara, and the Kyrenia castle depot is said to have held "icons and antiques" [1, pp. 143–144]. The account names no archaeological object in the chests: no pot, figurine, coin or sculpture. Every object it does identify is an icon. Of the two inventories it says the seized objects matched, St Barnabas was in 1981 a church with its icons; it did not become a museum with an archaeological collection until restoration began in August 1991 [3, p. 167]. The Kyrenia castle depot is less clear: besides the icons, it had received a batch of "antiques from Morphou", entered on a separate inventory page that later disappeared, and Olay does not say what they were [1, p. 144].

So the 158 cannot be divided between church art and archaeology. It may have included ancient objects; Olay's wording allows it, the Morphou batch at Kyrenia is unexplained, and the earlier consignments of "antiques" to the same address are not described at all. But the documented content of the Ankara chests is icons. A count of 158 "antiquities" from this case, added to a total of archaeological losses, adds church art to archaeology, which is the merging that church art and antiquities sets out to avoid.

What the case shows about the two trades

The strongest reading of the case against the separation of the two trades is that the same people and routes handled both. On that point the evidence is real. The same Turkish Cypriot series describes the robbery of "icons from the churches" and of "the coin, stamp, and antique collections from Varosha" as carried out by one system of dealers, diggers and protectors, and in its final instalment calls it a "MAFIA" whose net "extends as far as Turkey, Germany and Britain" [1, pp. 143, 150]. Germany was the destination of the Ankara chests and, in the view of Vassos Karageorghis, Director of Antiquities of the Republic, speaking in January 1983, the first market for Cypriot objects of every kind: "Germany is number one", followed by Switzerland and England [4, p. 364]. Later recoveries in Munich showed icons, frescoes and ancient objects kept by the same holder (see the Munich seizure of 1997).

What the Ankara case documents, then, is a shared route and a shared destination, not shared chests of mixed goods. The objects the account identifies were church art taken from a church and from a store that held mainly church art, and the inquiry they started was an inquiry into icons. Hadjisavvas, writing from the side of the Republic, describes the general pattern in the same terms: thousands of icons "taken from churches all over the occupied territory" and stored in "the medieval galleries of the Kyrenia Museum right on the sea" [2, p. 130].

What became of the objects

The seized objects went back to the north. Olay says they were handed to the authorities in Cyprus on 29 May 1981 and checked against the Kyrenia and St Barnabas inventories [1, p. 144]. No later published account says where they were kept, whether the icons sawn into pieces were restored, or whether any returned to the churches they came from. The icon museum now in the church of St Barnabas was opened by the Turkish Cypriot authorities after restoration work begun in August 1991, and "more icons were added to the collection in 1992" [3, p. 167]; no source connects those icons with the Ankara seizure. The German address was never officially identified [1, p. 144]. No prosecution arising from the chests is recorded.

What the case means for an object on the market today

For a buyer or owner of an ancient Cypriot object, the Ankara seizure is not evidence that archaeological material from the north was exported in quantity in 1981; its documented content is church art. It is evidence that Germany was the destination of goods taken from the occupied north in the early 1980s, and that those goods moved through Turkey under false labels. An icon with a Cypriot history that passes through Germany in those years has a known route to explain. A Bronze Age pot does not acquire a northern history because of this case. Its record is its own, and the lawful channels by which most such pots left Cyprus long before 1974 are set out in northern types with lawful histories.