The Morphou Mayor's Shop: The Hadjiloizides Collection and the Seizures of 1975

Morphou, in the west of the occupied north, had before 1974 at least one registered private collection of antiquities, that of Christakis Hadjiloizides. After the Turkish invasion, objects bearing the collection's marks turned up in the shop of the town's new mayor, who was also a licensed antiques dealer. Turkish Cypriot antiquities officials seized 217 of them, found 72 more at his house, and identified the marks from the list of stolen antiquities that the Republic's Department of Antiquities had sent to UNESCO. The case is known from a single account, the series "Perishing Cyprus" printed in 1982 by the Turkish Cypriot weekly Olay, which quotes an official letter of 1977. It is a different case from the Hadjiprodromou collection of Famagusta, and the two should not be merged: these objects were seized inside the north and were not, as far as the record shows, exported. The photograph at the head of this page is a United States satellite image of Morphou and its orchards in 1967, before the invasion (CORONA programme, public domain).

The Hadjiloizides collection

Almost nothing is published about the collection itself. Olay calls its owner "the antique collector from Morphou, Christakis Hadjiloizides", and describes it as a private collection that was under official supervision [1, pp. 150–151]. Its marks are the evidence that it was registered with the Republic before 1974: the initials "OHL" and the numbers on the objects were matched against the list of stolen antiquities "submitted to UNESCO by the Greek Cypriot Antiquities Department" [1, p. 150]. That list was drawn from the record of declared collections that the Department completed in December 1973, when every item was given "a card with a description and photograph" [2, p. 233]. The source does not explain the initials. The size of the collection, when and how it was formed, and what it contained are not recorded.

The seizure at the mayor's shop

The account rests on a letter of 21 March 1977 from Raif Birman, counsellor at the Turkish Cypriot ministry of education and culture, to the Attorney-General, which Olay quotes: "On 3.10.1975 the investigations were completed regarding the 217 items of antiquity confiscated from the ... shop of the Morphou Mayor, Isfendiyar Rifat. On some of these confiscated antiques were the initial OHL and some numbers which suggested that these belonged to the antique collector from Morphou, Christakis Hadjiloizides. Later, from the list of stolen antiques submitted to UNESCO by the Greek Cypriot Antiquities Department, it became clear that the initials OHL belonged to the aforesaid Greek Cypriot" [1, p. 150]. Olay gives the mayor's full name as İsfendiyar Rıfat Açıksöz and describes him as a licensed antiques dealer [1, pp. 151–152].

The date of 3 October 1975 is the date the inquiry was completed, not the date of the seizure, which is not given. The confiscation was made by the Turkish Cypriot administration's own Antiquities Department, inside the north, about a year after the invasion.

The 72 objects at his house

The same letter records that in the same year, "following investigations carried out by the experts of the 'Antiquities Department and the Directorate of the Museums', 72 items of antiquity were found in his house" [1, p. 150]. According to the letter, the mayor "claimed that he brought these antiques from the south" [1, p. 150]. Olay adds that antiquities seized in a later smuggling case, which had come from him, were also "ascertained" to have been stolen from the Hadjiloizides collection [1, p. 151]. Whether the 72 objects carried the collection's marks is not stated.

Later sales reported by Olay, 1980 to 1982

Olay went on to list later seizures of antiquities that, it says, the same dealer had sold to foreign visitors, drawing on a letter of 1980 from Hasan Şefik Altay, director of the Turkish Cypriot Antiquities Department. The batches were small. In October 1980 fourteen pieces sold to an Italian visitor were confiscated at Tymbou airport; on 1 January 1982 eighteen pieces "sold ... for DM 1,000 to a German" were confiscated as they were being taken out; and in November 1982 twelve pieces sold to a tourist were seized at Tymbou [1, p. 151]. These are the sizes and prices of a local trade with tourists, not of a network supplying the London salerooms, and they are discussed with the other Turkish Cypriot evidence in Turkish Cypriot accounts and organised looting, 1977 to 1982.

Olay wrote that "in spite of everything, no legal measures have so far been taken against Isfendiyar Rifat", and that he had obtained a permit for a private collection in his wife's name [1, p. 151]. The writer's complaint was that the man was treated as innocent despite the findings, and he described the mayor as one "who was involved in antique irregularities" [1, pp. 150, 152]. No court proceedings on the Hadjiloizides objects are recorded, and no charge or conviction is known to this account.

The Famagusta District Museum figurines

The same series reports a second loss that may lead back to Morphou. Olay asked whether readers had heard "that figurines ... kept in the Archaeological Museum have been stolen and smuggled to London" from Varosha, the new town of Famagusta [1, p. 139]. Later it reports that "the Antiquities Department has located those antiques which were stolen from the Varosha Museum of Archaeology and whose names were changed. An antique dealer in Morphou was held responsible" [1, p. 152]. The passage does not name the dealer and does not say what was recovered. From the other side of the line, Karageorghis had written in 1975 that "it is already officially ascertained that the jewellery and other small objects of the Famagusta District Museum were looted last summer" [2, p. 234], and in 1992 he described London as a centre of the trade in Cypriot antiquities whose dealers drew on "the occupied area of northern Cyprus" [3]. Whether the dealer of Varosha and the mayor of Morphou were the same man cannot be settled from the published text. The museums of the north are treated in museums and excavation stores in the north.

The limits of the evidence

The case has one source. Olay was a Turkish Cypriot weekly writing critically about its own administration, and its series is the earliest inside account of the trade in the north. It is known in English only through the translation printed in the record of a hearing of the United States Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1985, and the scanned text is imperfect in places. The 217 and the 72 are figures from an official letter as the newspaper quoted it. No publication of the Republic's Department of Antiquities that mentions the Hadjiloizides collection has been found, and no list of what the objects were.

Their present location is not recorded. They were taken into the custody of the Turkish Cypriot Antiquities Department in 1975; they may still be in a store or museum in the north, or they may have been returned to the dealer or dispersed. None has been reported in a sale or a repatriation. That is the main difference from the Hadjiprodromou collection, whose objects reached Christie's in London within two years of the invasion and were claimed by their owner there.

What the case means for an object on the market today

An antiquity marked "OHL" with a number, or one that matches the Department of Antiquities' photographs of the Hadjiloizides collection, is stolen property, and the Department in Nicosia is the place to ask. The case also shows how much depends on the 1973 registration. The Turkish Cypriot officials who examined the mayor's stock in 1975 could identify the collection only because the Republic had recorded it and circulated the record; objects without such marks, like the pieces sold to tourists in 1980 to 1982, could not be traced to an owner. A Cypriot object of a western or northern type that carries no mark and no record is not by that fact from this case, and the documents that show a lawful history are set out in lawful and illicit in the record.