Collections That Became Museums: Private Collections on Cyprus and Their Public Homes after 1974

The private collections of antiquities formed on Cyprus before 1974 did not stay private for long. Within forty years of the Turkish invasion most of those that survived it had passed into public view, by one of four routes: a gift to the state, a gift to a foundation set up to keep the collection together, a long-term loan to a public museum, or a purchase by a foundation that then gave the objects to the state. This page follows that institutional story in date order, from the Pierides Foundation of June 1974 to the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation's takeover of the Pierides Museum in 2013, and sets out what the law allowed a declared owner to do. How each collection was formed, and where its objects came from, is told in the island collections and is not repeated here; the policy that let several of them grow between 1963 and 1973 is in collecting under the silent accord. The photograph at the head of the page is the Kallinikeio Municipal Hall and Museum at Athienou, opened in 2009 (Photo: Knowledge2need, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0).

What the law allowed a declared owner

A collection could become public only because the law recognised it as private property in the first place. Under the Antiquities Law of 1935, carried into the Republic as Cap. 31, a resident could keep antiquities he had declared to the Department of Antiquities. The large collections of the 1960s were declared in the second half of 1973, and the Department completed its record of them in December of that year, with "a card with a description and photograph of every single item" [1, p. 233]. After independence, as the Director of Antiquities Vassos Karageorghis wrote, the law "was amended and it is now virtually impossible for large private collections of antiquities to be formed" [11, p. 9]. What already existed could still be held.

Three rules governed what an owner could do with a declared collection after 1974. First, it could be exported only in part and only by permit: in 1983 Karageorghis said that objects "legally acquired and duly registered by December 31, 1973, and which are not needed by the Cyprus Museum, can be exported with a permit from the Department of Antiquities" [13, p. 364]. That door closed with the amendment of 1996; section 27 of the law now allows an export licence only for exhibition, long-term loan, the study of excavated material or a gift by the President, and forbids a licence for the export of a private collection [12]. Second, open dealing ended in 1996: section 26 says that no person shall deal in antiquities [12]. Third, a declared piece may still change hands in specific circumstances. Section 33 requires the person disposing of a listed piece and the person receiving it to notify the Director within fourteen days, and lets the Minister require a piece needed by the Cyprus Museum to be handed over [12]. Collections also passed by inheritance; the Phylactou collection, for one, was inherited before it was lent [11, p. 9]. Export under licence between the invasion and 1996 is described in licensed export, 1974 to 1996.

Within those rules an owner who wanted his collection kept together and seen had four choices. He could give it to the state, which meant the Cyprus Museum. He could set up or endow a foundation and give the collection to it. He could lend it to a public museum and keep the title. Or, where the objects had been lost and recovered, a third party could buy them from him and give them to the state. Each of the four was used.

The record in date order

The table lists every transfer of an island collection into public hands for which there is a published account. "Public since" is the year the objects entered an institution, which is not always the year they went on display.

Foundations and gifts, 1974 to 1984

The first transfer came a month before the invasion. In June 1974 the head of the Pierides family "donated the collection to the Pierides Foundation which he himself established, with the intention of endowing it with adequate funds to enable the Foundation to enrich the collection in collaboration with the Department of Antiquities" [2, p. 18]. The form matters. A foundation kept the collection in the family house at Larnaca, under its own board, and open to the public, while tying its future growth to the Department. It has been the Pierides Museum ever since, and the oldest private museum on the island. The family's history is told in the Pierides family collection.

The second route was a purchase for the state, and it came out of the invasion itself. The Hadjiprodromou collection of Famagusta, "registered by the Department of Antiquities in 1973", began to be looted a year after the occupation of the town. Pieces that appeared in auction catalogues "were immediately claimed by the owner, others were offered for sale by 'middle-men'", and "those objects restored by one means or another to their legal owner were finally bought by the Foundation from the collector and were presented to the Cyprus Museum" [3, p. 54]. They entered the museum in 1981 as one batch. The A. G. Leventis Foundation paid the lawful owner for his own recovered property, and the objects became the state's. That purchase belongs to a longer series set out in the state as buyer.

The third was an outright gift to the state. Karageorghis's chronicle for 1984 opens its Cyprus Museum section with it: "Une donation importante a été faite au Musée par le Dr. et Mme Lyssarides de Nicosie, qui ont offert une grande partie de leur collection privée, dûment enregistrée" [4, p. 898]. "Dûment enregistrée", duly registered, is the Director's phrase, and it places the gift inside the register of 1973. The donors were Vassos Lyssarides and his wife, and the objects, among them figured Archaic pottery, terracottas and limestone heads, were accessioned in several batches that year and have been published since under their Cyprus Museum numbers [4, p. 898].

Nicosia's two new institutions, 1984 to 1999

The same year, 1984, produced two institutions that later took in private collections. The Leventis Municipal Museum was "founded in 1984 on the initiative of the Mayor of Nicosia, Lellos Demetriades"; the Leventis Foundation bought and restored a listed building on Ippokratous Street, an Association of Friends was formed in 1986 "to assist in the acquisition of the Museum's collections", and the Municipality and the Foundation opened the museum in 1989; it won the European Museum of the Year Award in 1991 [5, p. 40]. It did not begin from a private collection. It built one, by purchase and gift, around the history of the city, and admission is free.

The Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation was also founded in 1984 [6]. In 1999 the Giabra Pierides collection, the other branch of the Pierides family's nineteenth-century collection, was given to it by the collectors' daughter and her husband, and the Foundation opened a museum for it on its premises in Nicosia in 2002, with Karageorghis's catalogue [6, 7]. The museum is free to enter, and in 2015 a further 104 objects were added to it on long-term loan [6]. In his preface to the Phylactou catalogue Karageorghis summed up the two family collections: "Two major private collections in Cyprus have now been given to two private museums", the Pierides Foundation Museum in Larnaca and the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation in Nicosia [11, p. 9].

Loans, 2002 to 2013

The later transfers were loans, in which the owner keeps the title and the public gets the display. The collection of Thanos N. Zintilis (1929 to 2019), formed mainly abroad, was placed in 2002 on long-term loan with the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, in the museum's words with the consent of the Cypriot state, and has been on display there since its catalogue appeared in 2004 [8]. It is the one collection on this page whose public home is outside Cyprus.

On the island the model loans are the Severis and Phylactou collections. At the end of 2009 the collectors' son "decided to give the whole of his collection on long term loan, for exhibition in the newly established 'Constantine Leventis Wing'" of the Leventis Municipal Museum [10, p. 11]. The Phylactou collection, inherited by its owner "from his forefathers", went on long-term loan to the same museum, and the two galleries in the new wing, "inaugurated in January 2010", hold one collection each [11, p. 9]. Karageorghis wrote both catalogues, with funding from the A. G. Leventis Foundation, and both collections have pages here: Severis and Phylactou.

The last change was one of management, not of ownership. When the Laiki (Popular) Bank was wound up in the banking crisis of 2013, the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation absorbed its cultural centre and, in June 2013, took over the management of the Pierides Museum in Larnaca under a trust between the Bank and the Pierides Foundation [6].

Local and municipal museums

Not every new museum of the period came from a private collection. The Kallinikeio Municipal Museum at Athienou, opened on 3 July 2009, holds archaeological finds from excavations in and around the town, the icons of the monk-painter Kallinikos Stavrovouniotis, after whom it is named, and an ethnographic collection [9]. Its antiquities are state finds placed in a municipal building, not a private collection made public. It belongs on this page as the contrast: by 2009 the way a town acquired antiquities to show was through excavation and the Department, not through collectors.

The evidence against: what a museum home does not settle

The strongest objection is that public display does not alter where the objects came from. Much of what entered these collections between 1963 and 1973 was bought from looters. A later Director of Antiquities, Sophocles Hadjisavvas, wrote that the antiquities collected in that decade were "illegal in the sense that they all came from illicit excavations", and that "more than 1250 people had become collectors", as Samuel Hardy quotes and summarises him [14, p. 462]. Hardy reads the declaration window of 1973 as "the legalisation of its silent partners' illicit collections through an amnesty" [14, p. 462]. Registration and display record who owned an object, not where or how it was dug up.

A second objection is that the catalogues themselves give the collectors status. Reviewing the Giabra Pierides catalogue and others of the same kind, David Frankel wrote that "the focus of these books on the individual, context-free object and the promotion of the private collector and collection still provides an implicit legitimization for the current generation of collectors", and that "Most Cypriots and Cypriot authorities have taken a more pragmatic approach to acquiring and using looted antiquities than the harder stance of the AIA and other institutions" [15]. On this reading the move into museums is part of a promotional programme, not a neutral transfer.

A third is that not everything went towards the public. The Hadjiprodromou collection, registered and photographed, was looted in occupied Famagusta and dispersed; in 1983 Karageorghis counted "only 40 or 50 of approximately 2,000 items" recovered [13, p. 364]. About 600 Severis pieces were lost in July 1974 [10, p. 14], and the part of the Phylactou collection kept at Bellapais is, in its owner's words, "irretrievably lost" [11, p. 13]. Recovery also cost money: the owner got some pieces back "by one means or another", and the Foundation then paid him for them [3, p. 54]. And the two Nicosia loans remain private property, lent and not given.

The answer in the record

The digging was not lawful, and the pages on the 1960s say so. The record answers a different question: what the state did with collections that already existed. It registered them object by object in 1973 [1, p. 233]. It described the policy in print, in an international journal, in a letter written in 1975 [1, pp. 233–234]. Its Director published their catalogues, so that the objects are known to scholarship and can be identified. And the collections then did what the policy was meant to make them do: they stayed on the island and went into public view. Of the three largest collections of the decade, Pierides has been a public museum since 1974 and Severis since 2010; the third, Hadjiprodromou, was dispersed by the invasion, not by its owner, and the Department could claim its pieces because it held the records [1, p. 234]. Two of the four routes put objects into state ownership outright, and the other two put them behind public doors, two of them with free admission. Frankel's point about legitimacy is a judgement on the catalogues; the transfers themselves were made in the open, under the law and with the Department's knowledge.

What this means for an object on the market today

Objects from these collections do not normally come to market, and the reasons are structural. Those given to the state, the Lyssarides gift and the recovered Hadjiprodromou pieces, are Cyprus Museum property with inventory numbers. Those given to foundations, the Pierides and Giabra Pierides collections, belong to institutions whose purpose is to keep them together. The Severis and Phylactou collections are on loan, still privately owned, and still subject to the law on declared possession: a change of hands has to be notified to the Director, the Minister can require a piece the Cyprus Museum needs, and no export licence can be granted for a private collection [12]. Every one of them is catalogued or carded.

A stray piece offered with one of these names, "ex Pierides", "ex Severis", "from a Nicosia collection registered in 1973", therefore needs more than the name. It needs a catalogue or inventory number that can be checked against the published catalogue or the Department's register; evidence of how it left the collection, such as a documented exchange, sale or gift with notice to the Director; and, if it is now outside Cyprus, an export licence from before the 1996 amendment. A piece that matches a catalogued object still held by a museum, or a Hadjiprodromou object, is a matter for the Department of Antiquities. A piece with a genuine old island provenance and a licence can be sold abroad, and many have been. How the market reads an undocumented Cypriot object is set out in the 1974 presumption, and the buyer's checks in collecting Cypriot antiquities today.