The Decline after 1997: the End of the Northern Network and the Cases That Followed

The organised removal of church art and antiquities from the occupied north of Cyprus did not end on a single day, but it lost its centre in October 1997, when the Bavarian police seized the stock of the Munich dealer Aydın Dikmen. Dikmen was never convicted of anything; the case against his stock was decided in the civil courts, and the objects came back to Cyprus in three batches between 2013 and 2024. In the quarter-century after the seizure, the people named in Turkish Cypriot and Turkish reporting as the network's principals grew old and died, and the open record of looting in the north thinned to a handful of small cases: a police search of one house in 2006, a sting and counter-sting in 2007, a newspaper list in 2008, and a stolen Archaic statue found in a sheep pen in 2024. This page sets out what that record contains, what it does not show, and how the bicommunal heritage work that began in 2008 fits beside it. The ruin field of Enkomi at the head of the page, a Late Bronze Age town in the occupied north, is one of the sites whose conservation the bicommunal committee has discussed without agreement.

The Munich seizure and the end of the network

The seizure itself, the sting that led to it and the court case that followed are told in the Munich seizure of 1997. For the north, its importance is that it removed the buyer and store at the end of the chain. Turkish reporting of 1989, which a Turkish Cypriot assembly debate of the same year put on the record, described a gang with a Munich "international boss" (Dikmen) and a "local boss" in Nicosia, the Turkish Cypriot former paramilitary and intelligence agent Mehmet Ali İlkman, known as "Tremeşeli" [3, pp. 128–129]. Those are the reporter's and the deputies' descriptions. Dikmen was never convicted of anything, as his legal representative stated in 2010 [3, p. 127], and no conviction of İlkman for an offence concerning Cypriot antiquities is recorded.

The principals did not survive the decline long. İlkman died on 26 November 2012 and, according to the Turkish Cypriot news agency's report, was remembered as "one of TMT's leading names" [3, p. 129]. Dikmen had died by 2024, when the Church of Cyprus spoke publicly of "his heirs" [2]; the year usually given is 2020. In 2008 the objects that remained in his possession were imported into Turkey in his wife's name, because she held a collector's permit and he could not obtain one, and donated to the museum of Selçuk University in Konya [3, p. 128]. That deposit is outside the reach of any court that has heard a Cypriot claim.

The returns from Munich, 2013 to 2024

The Church of Cyprus and the Republic sued Dikmen in Munich in 2004. The District Court ruled for them in 2010, and after his appeal the objects came back in stages: 173 in July 2013 and, by the Church's count, another 85 in August 2015 [1], though the court's order of March 2015 and the Department of Antiquities' totals give 34 for that batch, as set out in the Munich seizure of 1997. The final batch was settled by a Historic Repatriation Agreement signed in Munich and announced on 11 June 2024. It provided for the return of "24 ecclesiastical relics and 36 prehistoric and other antiquities" after 20 June [1]. The objects were shown at the Cyprus Museum at a ceremony on 22 July 2024 [2].

The final return is the clearest modern evidence that archaeological material from the north passed through the same hands as the church art. The Church's statement of June 2024 described Dikmen as responsible for the removal of objects from more than 50 Orthodox, Maronite and Armenian monuments, "as well as antiquities from occupied archaeological sites and private collections" [1]. The Cyprus Mail's report of the July ceremony repeats the phrase as "antiquities from archaeological sites and private collections in the north" [2]. Neither report names the sites or the collections, and neither lists the 36 antiquities. The two kinds of object were different, and their markets were different, but the Munich store held both.

The residual cases, 2006 to 2008

After 1997 the Turkish Cypriot press continued to report antiquities cases in the occupied north, and its reports are the main record for these years.

On 6 January 2006 the Turkish Cypriot daily Kıbrıs reported a police seizure at İlkman's house under the headline "History gushed out of Tremeşeli's house" [7]. The contents are not specified in the English summary of the report, and no prosecution is recorded. On 18 October 2007 the Turkish Cypriot police arrested Stephanos Stephanou, a Greek Cypriot former consul, during an operation against antiquities trafficking in the north; he was held on an antiquities charge and died in custody on 2 November [6]. On 1 February 2008 Yeni Düzen printed a list of "well-known names in the smuggling of antiquities", which included İlkman [8].

These are the cases of a market in its residue. None involved a named church or site whose loss was new, none led to a recorded conviction, and the 2007 case shows that a Greek Cypriot could still be arrested in the north in an antiquities operation. The same years produced recoveries of church art bought long before: in December 2014 two twelfth-century wall-painting fragments from the monastery of Panagia Apsinthiotissa near Kyrenia, bought on the illicit market by a Canadian collector, were donated and shown at the House of Lords in London [4, p. 133].

The Marathovounos statue, 2024

The one fresh archaeological case in the open record of recent years is Cypro-Archaic. On 6 February 2024 the Turkish Cypriot police found a limestone statue of a woman, given as 2,600 years old, 160 centimetres tall and 200 kilograms in weight, "buried in a pile of animal manure in a sheep pen" at Marathovounos (Ulukışla in Turkish) in the Famagusta district [5]. The police valued it at around 5 million Turkish lira (about €150,925); this is a police valuation, not a price. Five people were arrested. Two, who according to the police had admitted the theft, were released on bail by a court in the north and barred from leaving it, to be tried later; the other three were released without charge [5]. Whether the statue was newly dug, taken from a store, or held privately for years is not stated, and the outcome of the trial has not been reported.

The heirs and the old stock

At the ceremony of 22 July 2024 the Bishop of Karpasia, Christophoros, speaking for the Archbishop, said that Dikmen's "heirs unfortunately still possess, and traffic stolen cultural goods from Cyprus" [2]. That is the Bishop's statement. No heir has been named in any public source, and no case against an heir has been reported. It is the only on-the-record allegation that any part of the Dikmen network continued after his death.

Other returns of 2024 show a different kind of inheritance. Ten days after the Munich ceremony, the Cyprus Mail reported the return of 37 antiquities that a German citizen working at the German embassy in Nicosia had removed in the 1960s; after his death in 2023 his heir contacted the Cypriot embassy in Berlin and asked that they be handed to the Cypriot authorities [10]. The objects had left the island before 1974, and before the amendment that closed lawful export in 1996, yet the same report placed them beside the "mass looting" after 1974 [10]. Most of the returns of the 2020s are of this kind: consignments or gifts by the heirs of old collections, withdrawn from regional salerooms or handed over, without a named trafficker and without a northern find-spot.

The Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage

In April 2008, when bicommunal working groups were set up to prepare for direct talks, the two leaders, Demetris Christofias and Mehmet Ali Talat, formed a Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage, whose members serve on a voluntary basis. Its mandate is the immovable heritage of the island, not portable objects. It set up an advisory board of archaeologists, architects, art historians and town planners from both communities [4, p. 135]. By 2015 some 20 monuments, mostly churches and mosques, had been structurally supported, protected or restored through the UN Development Programme, with about €5.3 million from the European Commission since 2012 [4, pp. 135–136]. In 2010 the committee completed an inventory of 2,300 sites, with technical assessments of the 121 most important in the occupied area; it has not been published, because the Turkish Cypriot side would not accept certain words, among them "vandalism", in the international experts' descriptions [4, pp. 135–136].

The committee's record on archaeological sites is thinner. Sophocles Hadjisavvas, a member for six years, wrote that he could not bring a single important archaeological site into its conservation programme. The Neolithic settlement of Ayios Epiktitos-Vrysi, excavated before 1974 by a British expedition, was on the 2009 priority list and saw no work. His proposals for urgent work at Enkomi were refused on the ground that jurisdiction over Enkomi and Salamis had passed to the University of Ankara [4, p. 136]. The committee is a fact of the period after 1997; it did not deal with portable antiquities, and it did not end illicit digging.

Evidence that the looting did not end

The decline described here is a decline in the open record, and the evidence against reading it as an end to looting is considerable.

• Hadjisavvas, writing forty years after the invasion, said that "looting continues to flourish", and that he had "personally observed recent large-scale looting in the necropolis of Agia Irene in northwest Cyprus" [4, p. 132].
• Marc Fehlmann, who writes from the Eastern Mediterranean University in occupied Famagusta and rejects the Republic's figure of 60,000 looted objects, still states that well-informed gangs "regularly plunder" archaeological sites in the north, some unknown to the Department of Antiquities, and are rarely caught [9].
• The Marathovounos statue of 2024 shows that large sculpture could still be moved and hidden in the north [5].
• The Bishop of Karpasia's statement of 2024 alleges that Dikmen's heirs still hold and trade Cypriot material [2].
• Policing and reporting in the north have always been weak. In 1982 the director of the Turkish Cypriot antiquities department told Olay that thieves had struck even with watchmen present, and that "you cannot have an armed man for every antique" [11, p. 150]. Few reported cases may mean few cases detected.

What the record supports is narrower: the hierarchical network that Turkish and Turkish Cypriot reporting described for 1975 to 1997, working from lists of known churches and selling through Munich, has no documented successor. Digging for ordinary tomb goods continued at a level that cannot be measured.

What the record means for an object on the market today

An undocumented Cypriot antiquity offered now is unlikely to come from the Dikmen network, which has no documented successor, and more likely to come from an old collection dispersed by heirs. That does not make it lawful. The Republic's claims rest on the date of export and on the documents that prove it, not on how organised the looting of a given decade was, and the presumption against objects with no history before 1974 has outlived the network that gave it force. The reasons are set out in the 1974 presumption. Church art from the north is a separate case: icons, frescoes and mosaics are individually recorded, and any piece with a northern church history and no documented exit before 1974 will be claimed (see church art and antiquities). For an ordinary pot or figurine of a northern type, the questions are the same as for any Cypriot object: when it left the island, and what paper shows it. The lawful channels and their records are described in legal export of Cypriot antiquities and northern types with lawful histories, and the practical steps for an owner in collecting Cypriot antiquities today.