Turkish Cypriot Accounts of Looting in the Occupied North

Much of what is known about the looting of the occupied north after the Turkish invasion of 1974 was written down first by Turkish Cypriots. In the spring of 1982 the Nicosia weekly Olay published a four-part series by the journalist Mehmet Yaşın, "Perishing Cyprus", which quoted the letters of the Turkish Cypriot antiquities department and ministry, named a mayor and a museum director, and reported a smuggling ring reaching to Turkey, Germany and Britain. An investigating committee of the Turkish Cypriot assembly had reported on the same subject a year earlier, and in 1989 the assembly debated a motion for a parliamentary inquiry into antiquities smuggling. Turkish Cypriot archaeologists gave evidence in the courts, rescued robbed tombs and later wrote their own accounts, and the Turkish Cypriot press went on reporting cases into the 2000s. This page sets out that record, with its dates and its authors, as the account from inside the north. Where it describes a person as a smuggler, that is the writer's description; the outcome in court is given where it is known. The photograph at the head of the page shows Kyrenia harbour from the castle that served as an icon depot after 1974.

The Olay series of 1982

Olay ran the series on 26 April, 3 May, 10 May and 17 May 1982, under the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus, the name the Turkish Cypriot administration in the occupied north used before 1983. An English translation was printed in 1985 in the record of a hearing on human rights in Cyprus before the United States Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe [1, pp. 137–152].

The second instalment opened with the plan of the series: to tell "how the historic masterpieces were stolen by antique dealers", the illegal digs, the museum robberies and the smuggling, and then the stolen icons, mosaics and candelabra and "the churches which have been turned into stables" [1, p. 141]. It reported that the authorities' plan for an icon museum at Morphou was intended, in the words it attributed to the Evkaf administration and the antiquities department, "to forestall the use of the churches as a means of propaganda which could put the Turkish Government in a difficult position at international fora" [1, p. 141].

On the archaeological sites, Olay reported that "illegal digs are being made in all districts", at Ayios Epiktitos and Krini as well as in the Famagusta district, which it called the most suitable for them [1, p. 143]. It traced a zone of digging from the caves of Galinoporni in the Karpas to Eptakomi, Ovgoros, Galatia and Ardhana, and along the road from Ayios Sergios to the monastery of St Barnabas, where tombs "which were protected before 1974, are now looted and robbed" [1, p. 143]. At Gastria, a city excavated before 1974, a gypsum and cement factory had been permitted over the site, and "antiquities were being smuggled out" with the construction traffic [1, pp. 140, 143]. The antiquities department in Famagusta had "not a single vehicle"; the year before, a tomb had collapsed on three students digging illegally and killed one of them. "Behind the illegal digs are the antique traders", with a contact in every region and men who dug for them [1, p. 143].

The Kyrenia Castle trial and the museum thefts

The first instalment and the third dealt with the depots. Icons brought to Kyrenia Castle from Lambousa, the Metropolis of Morphou and Larnaka tis Lapithou were found missing after an investigation in 1981: 225 in all. The antiquities department set up a commission, which wrote a 40-page report, and the director of its Kyrenia branch, Mehmet Rasıh Savarona, was removed and brought before a criminal court in the castle [1, p. 144]. Turkish Cypriot archaeologists of the department, among them Nusret Mahirel and Tuncer Bağışkan, gave evidence that numbers on the backs of icons had been changed and inventory pages removed and rewritten [1, p. 151]. At St Barnabas 35 icons had been stolen while the night-watchman was in the monastery; eleven were found in an abandoned house in Kythrea and eleven among the chests seized at Ankara airport in March 1981, which are the subject of the Ankara airport seizure of 1981 [1, p. 144]. The outcome of the Savarona trial is not recorded in the published accounts cited here. The trial is treated with the depot itself in the Kyrenia Castle icon depot.

The archaeological museum of Varosha (Famagusta) had also been robbed. Olay reported that its stolen antiquities had been located with their names changed, that "an antique dealer in Morphou was held responsible", and that some had been offered for sale in London until Greek Cypriots intervened [1, p. 152]. The museums are treated in museums and excavation stores in the north.

The antiquities department's own letters

The fourth instalment, of 17 May 1982, quoted the department's correspondence about the mayor of Morphou, İsfendiyar Rıfat Açıksöz, who was also a licensed antiquities dealer. In a letter to the Attorney-General of 21 March 1977, the ministry counsellor Raif Birman wrote that investigations had been completed on 3 October 1975 into 217 antiquities confiscated from the mayor's shop, some marked with the initials "OHL" and numbers that matched the registered collection of the Greek Cypriot collector Christakis Hadjiloizides of Morphou; the list of stolen antiquities sent to UNESCO by the Republic's Department of Antiquities had confirmed it [1, p. 150]. A letter of 30 September 1980 from the department's director, Hasan Şefik Altay, recorded that the mayor and Ekrem Yeşilada had asked him to release eight seized pieces to an Italian tourism businessman and let him take them abroad [1, p. 151]. Further pieces sold from the shop were seized at Tymbou airport on 11 October 1980 and 1 January 1982, the second lot of 18 pieces sold to a German for DM 1,000 [1, p. 151]. "In spite of everything," Olay wrote, "no legal measures have so far been taken" [1, p. 151]. It also recorded that the mayor had been fined for an illegal dig at Polis and cleared by the High Court [1, p. 150]. The case is set out in full in the Morphou mayor's shop.

Altay himself was interviewed in the third instalment. He said that the Council of Ministers had overruled the department over the Gastria factory; and that illegal digs were being carried out in various parts of the north, but "in many cases we cannot do anything to them because there are no eye witnesses" [1, pp. 147–149]. Asked why thefts happened even with watchmen present, he answered: "I think it is because the antiques bring in a lot of money", and "You cannot have an armed man for every antique!" [1, p. 150].

The series closed on the network. "As everything has a MAFIA in our country," the fourth instalment began, "so there is a MAFIA dealing in antique smuggling. The membership of this gang of antique smugglers extends to antique traders, certain political personalities and foreign missions. Its net extends as far as Turkey, Germany and Britain" [1, p. 150]. It reported, in its last paragraphs, that "last week a citizen of the Turkish Republic, Aydin Dikmen, was arrested in Kyrenia by security officials. He was on the list of antique smugglers whom the police are looking for" [1, p. 152]. Dikmen was released soon afterwards and was never convicted of anything.

The assembly debates of 1981 and 1989

Olay referred to an earlier inquiry: "The matter was clarified in detail last year by an investigatory committee set up in the Assembly, and its findings were brought to the attention of the Government and of the judiciary bodies" [1, p. 150]. That report, which Olay called secret, named "some of the prominent people, who are also private collectors and who co-operate with foreigners"; the deputy Erdal Süreç asked in the assembly why the judiciary had not acted on the mayor of Morphou [1, pp. 150, 152]. The committee's report has not been published.

The debate usually called the 1989 assembly inquiry took place on 2 June 1989, when the Turkish Cypriot assembly held a preliminary discussion of a motion "to launch a parliamentary investigation on the subject of 'antiquities smuggling'", recorded in its proceedings under the name of the deputy N. Talât (pp. 7853–7909) [2, pp. 129, 149]. The motion followed articles of May 1989 by the Turkish investigative journalist Özgen Acar in Cumhuriyet, which described a gang with a Munich "international boss" (Dikmen) and a Nicosia "local boss", the former paramilitary and intelligence agent Mehmet Ali İlkman. The debate put on the record Acar's description of İlkman as "Denktaş's right arm" [2, p. 129]. In the same year the assembly's proceedings recorded the grant of citizenship by the Turkish Cypriot administration to Dikmen (13 October 1989, p. 581) [2, p. 129].

The subject returned in 1997, the year of the Munich seizure. On 17 December 1997 Ferdi Sabit Soyer, a social democratic deputy in the governing coalition, raised Dikmen's activities in the assembly [2, p. 127]. Dikmen was never convicted of anything; his lawyer stated in 2010 that he had not been convicted at home or abroad [2, p. 127]. The assembly record shows what Turkish Cypriot deputies said and knew; it does not establish any conviction.

Tuncer Bağışkan and the archaeologists of the north

Tuncer Bağışkan was one of the archaeologists of the Turkish Cypriot antiquities department who gave evidence in the Kyrenia trial in 1982 [1, p. 151]. In 1986, as deputy director, he led the clearance of a rock-cut tomb at Sandıklı Taş near Akdeniz, the village of Ayia Irini on the north-west coast, after a report to the gendarmerie; the tomb had been robbed before it was reached, so the number of objects it once held cannot be known, and 1,150 objects survived the robbers to be recorded and shown in Kyrenia Castle [4]. The tomb was published in 2010 as a master's thesis at Mersin University [4]. It is a Turkish Cypriot record of a looted tomb in the same district where Sophocles Hadjisavvas later reported "recent large-scale looting in the necropolis of Agia Irene" [5, p. 132].

Bağışkan later wrote widely on the monuments of the island, including a survey of its Ottoman, Islamic and Islamised monuments, published in English in 2009 [10]. In a column in Yenidüzen of 13 December 2016 on the cultural heritage of the north, he set out what the department found when it began work in 1975: that the antiquities held by dealers in the north were collected; that some of the finds of the Ayios Epiktitos-Vrysi excavation, directed before 1974 by Edgar Peltenburg, had been moved to Kyrenia Castle and that part of them had been stolen; that display cases on both floors of the Famagusta archaeological museum were found empty, with their glass broken; and that icons collected from churches were later stolen from the castle stores and smuggled abroad [3]. He wrote that the first report of Jacques Dalibard, UNESCO's adviser in 1975, had stated that the island's heritage had been considerably damaged, and that UNESCO had asked for it to be changed and summarised because it would cause an international storm [3]. That is Bağışkan's account of the report; Hadjisavvas records that Dalibard's report was never published [5, p. 131].

Later reporting in the Turkish Cypriot press

The Turkish Cypriot press continued to report cases after 1997. On 6 January 2006 the daily Kıbrıs reported a police seizure at İlkman's house under the headline "History gushed out of Tremeşeli's house" [6]. On 1 February 2008 Yeni Düzen printed a list of "well-known names in the smuggling of antiquities", which included him [7]. Neither report is known to have led to a prosecution; İlkman died in 2012 [2, p. 129]. In February 2024 the Turkish Cypriot police announced the recovery of a 2,600-year-old limestone statue of a woman from a sheep pen at Marathovounos (Ulukışla) in the Famagusta district, and a court in the north released two suspects on bail to be tried later [8]. These cases are set in their period in the decline after 1997.

The limits of these accounts

The Turkish Cypriot record carries weight because its authors had no interest in exaggerating losses in the north. Its limits are these.

• It is a record of accusations as well as of facts. Olay named the mayor of Morphou as an "antique smuggler", but also recorded that the High Court cleared him of the Polis charge, and that no other legal measures were taken [1, p. 150]. The Kyrenia trial has no published verdict. Dikmen was never convicted of anything.
• The English text is a translation, printed under the author's name in a United States congressional hearing record of 1985; the Turkish original is not reproduced there [1].
• The series also reports losses that cut the other way. Olay noted that icons and antiquities stolen from churches and museums in the north had been found "in the house of a diplomat on the Greek side" [1, p. 152], and Bağışkan's column records that a report that Greek Cypriots had burned the mosque of Peristerona was found to be untrue, while describing damage to mosques [3].
• Turkish Cypriot archaeologists have also argued, against the Republic's position, that the international embargo on fieldwork and publication in the north has itself harmed the heritage by blocking rescue work there, and that accusations over religious monuments have served the politics of both sides [9, pp. 143–144].
• The accounts are rich for 1975 to 1982, for the depots and the dealers, and thin on the scale of tomb digging. Olay's zone of illegal digs is a description, not a count.

What these accounts mean for an object on the market today

The Turkish Cypriot record documents particular losses: the 225 icons of the Kyrenia depot, the icons of St Barnabas, the Varosha museum's antiquities, the "OHL" pieces of the Hadjiloizides collection, and the tomb goods dug along the Famagusta coast and at Gastria. Registered pieces from those losses can be identified, and are claimed. For ordinary pottery and figurines, which made up most of what was dug, the accounts show that digging took place across the north from 1975, but they give no list against which a particular pot can be checked. Such an object is judged, as any Cypriot antiquity is, by the documents that show when it left the island; how those records work is set out in northern types with lawful histories and legal export of Cypriot antiquities. The summary of the whole period is looting in occupied northern Cyprus after 1974, and the scale of the losses is weighed in how much was taken.