The Munich Seizure of 1997: Church Art from the Occupied North and its Return

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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.

In October and November 1997 the Bavarian police searched three flats in Munich used by Aydın Dikmen, a Turkish dealer living in the city, and took into storage several thousand objects. Among them were icons, wall paintings and mosaics that the Church of Cyprus and the Republic of Cyprus identified as coming from churches in the occupied north, removed after the Turkish invasion of 1974. The Republic and the Church then spent seventeen years proving ownership, object by object, in the German civil courts. The objects came home in three returns, in 2013, 2015 and 2024, and the first of them was described at the time as the largest number of stolen church treasures ever returned to Cyprus [5]. Dikmen was never convicted of anything, in Germany or anywhere else; the German case was a civil action about who owned the objects. The photograph at the head of this page shows the interior of the church of Christ Antiphonitis in the Kyrenia district as it stood in 1973; the Tree of Jesse on the south wall, at the right, was among the frescoes recovered in Munich (photo: Shirazibustan, 1973, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

The purchases of 1997 and the raids

The seizure followed a recovery operation paid for by the Church of Cyprus. Mark Rose's timeline in Archaeology, published in April 1998, sets out its stages [1]. In February 1997 the Dutch dealer Michel van Rijn approached the honorary consul of Cyprus in The Hague, who led the Church's work on stolen church art, and offered to act as intermediary in recovering Cypriot objects; about $500,000 was raised to fund the operation [1]. On 5 September 1997 van Rijn brought the Kanakaria mosaic of St Thaddeus to the Cypriot consulate in The Hague and received a first instalment. On 6 September, having bought 25 frescoes from Dikmen "using $75,000 of his own money", he "receives $168,000, of which $98,000 are expenses"; on 7 September he arranged the purchase of "seven larger frescoes for $49,000" [1]. The 32 frescoes were from Antiphonitis. They were shown at an exhibition in The Hague from 8 November and returned to Cyprus with the St Thaddeus mosaic on 22 December 1997 [1]. Van Rijn and his intermediaries received immunity [1].

The police operation came next. On 9 and 10 October 1997, during an exchange in Munich, the police raided two flats and seized fourteen cases and packages holding icons, two Antiphonitis frescoes and the Kanakaria mosaic of St Thomas, and arrested Dikmen [1]. A second search found twenty more boxes and cases, with icons, frescoes, early Bibles, pottery, statues and coins, and $16,000 and 200,000 guilders in cash. On 26 November a third flat yielded 30 to 40 crates containing 130 icons, 25 frescoes, two mosaics, other objects and a painting attributed to Picasso [1]. On 11 February 1998 the police seized nine Byzantine icons, bought from Dikmen, from a Munich dealer's home [1]. Cyprus began extradition proceedings against Dikmen on 29 October 1997 [1].

How many objects were seized

The totals differ because they count different things: everything found, the Cypriot part of it, or the part the courts considered.

The Munich police first valued the frescoes, mosaics and icons at more than $40 million [1]. The Munich court in 2010 valued the objects it returned at about €30 million, and the St Thomas mosaic alone at about €8 million [3]. Both are police and court valuations, not prices.

The German case over ownership

The criminal side ended early. The offences were found to be time-barred under German law, and Dikmen was never tried for them [3]. The Republic of Cyprus and the Church brought a civil action in Munich in 2004 [9]. On 23 September 2010 the Landgericht München I ruled that about 240 sacred objects were to go back to the Orthodox, Maronite and Armenian churches of Cyprus [3]. To win, the claimants had to show for each icon that it came from the north of Cyprus and had been removed against the owner's will and without the owner's knowledge [3]. Dikmen maintained that he had acquired the works lawfully and asked for them himself, and the Turkish Cypriot authorities in the north also lodged claims in Munich [3]. The court's experts included the Byzantinist Johannes Deckers; the identifications drew on the work of Athanasios Papageorgiou and Katerina Hadjistylli, and the Republic's lawyer was Enno Engbers [9].

Dikmen appealed. On 18 March 2013 the Oberlandesgericht München largely rejected the appeal, because expert reports had by then settled the ownership of most of the 214 objects before it; the German Foreign Office had earlier declined to approve a handover to Cyprus until ownership was clearly established [4]. The Cyprus Mail reported that the Church had shown that 173 objects came from 51 churches in the north [6]. The rest went to further expert hearings in December 2014, and the court proposed a settlement by February 2015 [7, p. 138]. On 16 March 2015 it ordered the return of 34 more objects and found that the Republic had not proved its ownership of 49 others, which it held to belong to Dikmen [6].

The 1954 Hague Convention and its First Protocol, under which a state party undertakes to return cultural property exported from occupied territory, do not appear in the published reports of the Munich decisions [3; 4; 6]. The case was won on ownership and provenance. That was the lesson of the parallel case in the Netherlands, where a Rotterdam court ruled in 1999 that the Protocol could not be relied on by a private claimant because the Netherlands had not yet written it into its own law [12, pp. 343–344]; see the Dutch icons.

The returns of 2013, 2015 and 2024

The 173 objects were handed over in July 2013 [9] and formally received at a ceremony in Nicosia in November, where Archbishop Chrysostomos II said that "after 40 years, the largest number of stolen treasures is coming back home" [5]. They included a fragment of a sixth-century mosaic, frescoes about 1,100 years old, and icons of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, and they went to the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia for restoration and display [5]. Hadjisavvas dates the appeal decision on the 173 objects to 18 March 2014 [7, p. 138]; the court's decision is dated 18 March 2013 [4] and the objects were back in Nicosia in 2013 [5], so the 2014 appears to be an error.

The number for 2015 is given as 34 or 85. The court's order of March 2015 covered 34 objects, 24 ecclesiastical and the rest prehistoric [6]. The Department of Antiquities gives 207 objects for the repatriations of 2013 and 2015 together [8, p. 36], which is 173 plus 34. The figure of 85 is the number of objects still in dispute after 2013, on which the court heard expert evidence in December 2014 [7, p. 138]; of those, 34 were returned and 49 were refused [6]. Later press accounts, including the Cyprus Mail in 2024, give 85 as the number returned in August 2015 [9; 10]. This page uses 34.

The last 60 objects came back under a repatriation agreement signed in Munich in June 2024, which closed the case: "24 ecclesiastical relics and 36 prehistoric and other antiquities" [9]. They were shown at a ceremony in Nicosia on 22 July 2024 [10]. The published accounts do not say whether the 60 included any of the 49 objects refused in 2015. At the ceremony Bishop Christophoros of Karpasia, speaking for the Archbishop, said that although Dikmen had died in 2020, "his heirs unfortunately still possess, and traffic stolen cultural goods from Cyprus" [10]. That is the Bishop's statement; no heir has been named in any public source.

Why the case is the largest recovery of church art

Taken together, the Munich case returned 267 objects through the courts and the final agreement (173, 34 and 60), and the purchases of September 1997 brought back another 32 frescoes and a mosaic. No other recovery of church art from the occupied north comes near this. The Kanakaria case in Indianapolis concerned four mosaic fragments; the frescoes from the chapel near Lysi were the cut-up decoration of a single dome and apse; the Dutch case concerned four icons (see Kanakaria and the Lysi frescoes). The Munich objects came from more than 50 churches across the north [9], so the case is a cross-section of the losses as much as a single recovery. The 1997 seizure also changed policy abroad: in April 1999 the United States imposed emergency import restrictions on Byzantine ecclesiastical and ritual ethnological material from Cyprus [13], three years before the archaeological agreement of 2002.

The evidence that complicates the case

Three points cut against a simple reading. First, most of what was found in Munich was not Cypriot. Of several thousand objects, Cyprus claimed about 300 [6]; the rest included pre-Columbian pottery, coins, Bibles, paintings and material from other countries [1]. The figure of $40 million was the police's estimate for the frescoes, mosaics and icons [1], and it should not be read as the value of Cypriot loot as a whole.

Second, the Church paid. About $500,000 was raised for the 1997 operation, and $168,000 went to van Rijn for one batch of 25 frescoes, $98,000 of it as expenses [1]. Money paid in a buy-back goes to whoever holds the objects, which is the standing objection to recovery by purchase. The Church's purchases are set out with the Republic's on the state as buyer.

Third, the stock was not only church art. The 2015 order included prehistoric objects [6], and 36 of the 60 objects in the final return were "prehistoric and other antiquities", described as taken from "occupied archaeological sites and private collections" [9]; Reuters reported the batch as "including items from the chalcolithic and bronze age" [11]. The sites have not been named in any public source. The Munich case is therefore the clearest modern instance of archaeological material from the north passing through the same hands as church art, though in small numbers beside the church objects. The point is weighed on church art and antiquities.

What the case means for objects on the market today

The Munich objects were won back because each could be matched to a church: photographs taken before 1974, inventories and the identifications of Byzantinists. Where that match failed, as with the 49 objects of 2015, the court left the object with its holder [6]. An icon or fresco fragment from Cyprus offered today without a documented history before 1974 belongs to a class in which claims have succeeded in court in Germany, in the United States and, after 2007, through the Netherlands government. The 36 antiquities of 2024 show that a buyer of an undocumented Cypriot antiquity can also meet material from the same network, though that is the exception in the archaeological market, where most Cypriot objects abroad left the island lawfully before 1974 (see the northern types with lawful histories). The wider account of the losses in the north is in looting in occupied northern Cyprus.