The Dutch Icons: Four Apostles from Antiphonitis and the Netherlands Courts

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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 Dutch icons are four panels from one church: sixteenth-century icons of the apostles Peter, Paul, John and Mark from the iconostasis of Christ Antiphonitis, in the hills of the Kyrenia district, in the occupied north [1, p. 341; 2]. They disappeared after the Turkish invasion of 1974, were bought in the Netherlands in the 1970s, and were found in 1995. The Church of Cyprus lost its claim to them in the Dutch courts in 1999 and 2002. The Netherlands then passed a law on cultural property from occupied territory, and in September 2013 its government handed the icons to the Republic of Cyprus [2; 3]. The case is short on facts but exact in law: it was, by the account of its first commentator, the first case in which a party to a private lawsuit invoked the First Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention [1, p. 344]. The photograph at the head of this page shows the sanctuary of the church in October 2014, with the iconostasis gone (photo: Chris06, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

The icons and their removal

The Church's case, accepted by the Rotterdam court, was that the four icons were in the church of Antiphonitis until the Turkish occupation of July and August 1974, and that they disappeared from it afterwards [1, p. 342]. The Cyprus Mail gives 1975 for their removal [2]. They belong with the other losses from the same church, whose wall paintings were cut away and later recovered in part through Munich (see the Munich seizure of 1997 and Antiphonitis).

The route by which the icons reached the Netherlands is not settled. The facts established by the Rotterdam court are that the defendant, a private collector, bought the four icons in the Netherlands in the 1970s from an art dealer for about 200,000 guilders, then about US $100,000 [1, pp. 341–342]. The Cyprus Mail reported in 2013 that they were "reportedly sold through an Armenian art dealer" to an elderly Dutch couple between 1975 and 1977 [2]. A later account, citing a report of 2013, says the couple bought them from Aydın Dikmen [4]; Dikmen was never convicted of anything, and the court's published findings name a different seller. Whether the dealer had the icons from Dikmen is not recorded.

The icons were not hidden. The collector lent them to an exhibition, "Important Icons from Private Collections", at the Prinsenhof Museum in Delft from 17 December 1976 to 15 January 1977 [1, p. 342], two years after the invasion.

The Rotterdam judgment of 1999

In 1995 the couple consigned the icons for sale at Christie's, which referred them to the Cypriot authorities because of their history [2]. On 25 July 1995 the Church obtained a pre-judgment attachment, and the icons were taken into judicial custody [1, p. 341]. The Church asked the District Court of Rotterdam to declare it the owner and to order the icons surrendered. It argued that it had been and remained the owner under international law and under Cypriot and Dutch law, that the seller had no right to dispose of the icons, and that the buyer had not acted in good faith [1, p. 342]. The defence first disputed that the icons came from Antiphonitis, then left the point to the court; it argued that Dutch law governed a sale made in the Netherlands, that the buyer had acted in good faith, and that he was the owner under Dutch law in any case [1, p. 342].

The court gave judgment on 4 February 1999. It found that the Church had owned the icons until July and August 1974 [1, p. 342]. It then held that the relevant provisions of the First Protocol were addressed to the states party to the Convention and did not bind or benefit private persons, and that the Netherlands had never taken the measures needed to apply the Protocol in its own law [1, p. 343]. It dismissed the Church's main argument, and with it the alternative claims under Cypriot law and on the buyer's lack of good faith [1, p. 344]. The Cypriot government had meanwhile asked the Netherlands for the icons' return under section I-3 of the Protocol, by which a state party undertakes to return cultural property exported from occupied territory; the Dutch government declined while the litigation was pending [1, p. 344].

The appeal of 2002

The Church appealed. According to the Church's lawyer in Amsterdam, the Court of Appeal found in 2002 that the claim was time-barred [3]. The Cyprus Mail summed up the result as the failure of the Church's legal efforts in 2002, "after a seven-year legal battle" [2]. The buyers kept the icons.

The 2007 Act and the return of 2013

The rulings were raised in the Dutch parliament, and in 2007 the Netherlands passed an act on the return of cultural property originating from occupied territory, giving effect to the Protocol in Dutch law [2; 3]. Cyprus's Minister of Foreign Affairs then wrote asking for the icons [4]. On Tuesday 24 September 2013 the Netherlands government handed them to the Republic of Cyprus at a ceremony in the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia, where Archbishop Chrysostomos II spoke [2; 3]. The icons were valued at about €150,000 by the Cyprus Mail [2] and about $200,000 in another report [3]. They came back by statute, not by purchase. The published accounts do not say whether the holders were compensated.

What the case shows

The Dutch case and the German case ran side by side and reached their results by different routes. In Munich the Republic and the Church won because they proved, object by object, that each piece came from a church in the north and was taken without the owner's consent. In the Netherlands the Church proved the same thing for the four icons, and the court accepted it [1, p. 342], but lost because the buyer's title under Dutch law and the passage of time outweighed it, and because the Protocol could not be used by a private claimant until the Netherlands made it law. The 2007 Act changed that for any icon from the occupied north that is found there.

For a buyer, the case shows that exhibition and open sale did not secure the icons' title: they were shown in a museum in 1976 and sold in the open, and they were still returned once Dutch law allowed the claim. A Cypriot icon with no record before 1974 is in a different position from an ancient Cypriot pot, most of which left the island lawfully before that date (see northern types with lawful histories). The other recoveries of church art from the occupied north are summarised in looting in occupied northern Cyprus.