Licensed Export from the Republic of Cyprus, 1974 to 1996

For twenty-two years after the Turkish invasion of 1974 it remained lawful to export antiquities from the Republic of Cyprus, under a licence from the Department of Antiquities, provided the objects had been lawfully acquired and registered by 31 December 1973 and the Cyprus Museum did not want them. The licensed dealers kept trading, the Cyprus Museum went on selling from its own Sales Register until 1991, and diplomats and foreign residents left with licensed purchases in their baggage. The channel closed in 1996, when an amending law prohibited dealing in antiquities and confined export licences to exhibitions, loans and study. This entry covers those years only: the rule as the Director of Antiquities stated it in 1983, the paperwork it produced, the people who used it, how much it moved, what the 1996 law changed and what it left to private owners. The longer legal history is in the legal export of Cypriot antiquities, and the dealers and registered collections before 1974 are in licensed dealers and registered collections. The jug at the head of this page, a Bichrome IV trefoil jug in this site's collection, still has the lead seal stamped C.M. that the Department tied to objects it had passed for export.

The export rule after 1974

The rule rested on the registration of 1973. An amendment of that year required every person holding antiquities to give the Director a list of them within six months from 1 July 1973, and the section as it now stands requires anyone who disposes of a listed object, and anyone who receives it, to notify the Director within fourteen days with a description and the name and address of the new owner [3, s. 33]. The Department's staff turned the lists into a card with a description and a photograph for every object, and Karageorghis wrote in 1975 that "this gigantic work ended in December 1973" [2, p. 233]. Objects on the cards had a lawful status. Possession of an antiquity left off the lists became an offence unless the holder could show a court that it had been lawfully acquired [3, s. 33(3)].

Nine years after the invasion Vassos Karageorghis, Director of Antiquities from 1963 to 1989, stated the policy to Ellen Herscher in an interview in Washington on 26 January 1983. Asked about legal exports, he said: "Objects which were 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. Objects found accidentally and not wanted by the Museum can also be disposed of" [1, p. 364]. The rule had three tests: lawful acquisition, registration by the cut-off, and the Museum's first choice. The second sentence kept open a narrow route for chance finds made after 1973, on the Museum's decision.

The rule applied only where the Republic's officers worked. After August 1974 the Department had no access to the occupied north, so a licence of these years was issued in Nicosia for an object in the south, inspected there. The Republic's position on anything leaving the occupied areas was the one Karageorghis put to the University of Virginia in 1982 and 1983: "the right to export antiquities rests in the legal government of a country" [1, p. 364]. When the Turkish Cypriot administration of the north gave the university's Bayly Museum 20 Cypriot pots in October 1982, the Republic argued that "since the parties exporting this collection had no legally recognized right to do so, the acquisition by the University of Virginia was illegal" [1, pp. 362–363]. The case is set out in museums and excavation stores in the north. No licence of the Department of Antiquities covered any of those pots.

Licences, seals and the scale of the trade

The paperwork did not change at the invasion. The printed form used in January 1978 was the same one the colonial Department had used: "Department of Antiquities. Nº 007070. Licence to Export Antiquities. Issued under the Antiquities Law, Cap. 43" [5, p. 10]. It still cited the colonial chapter number eighteen years after independence. The form declared the objects "examined and passed for export" and sealed in the officer's presence, which is why a licence and a lead seal stamped C.M., for Cyprus Museum, belong to one act of inspection. How to read both is described in the article on export licences, lead seals and labels.

Licences were numbered in one running sequence, and the surviving examples give a rough measure of the trade. Among the permits now in the Alexander Malios collection in Leipzig, licence No. 6455 is dated 1 February 1973 and No. 7070 is dated 16 January 1978 [5, p. 11]. If the numbers ran without a break, the Department issued about 615 export licences in those five years, a little over a hundred a year, across the invasion. Licence No. 7070 alone covered 62 objects for one private owner, of which 32 are now in Leipzig [5, p. 11], so the number of objects was several times the number of licences. No total for 1974 to 1996 has been published, and later anchors in the sequence have not been found.

Marc Fehlmann, writing from Eastern Mediterranean University in occupied Famagusta and openly critical of the Republic's heritage authorities, gives the only general statement. "Until 1996, the export of antiquities from the Republic of Cyprus was permitted as long as the Department of Antiquities had provided a licence. Thus, the then director of Antiquities of the Republic of Cyprus, Vassos Karagheorgis, allowed thousands of antiquities to leave the island", some of them as diplomatic gifts and some for private collectors [4, p. 156]. The "thousands" refers to Karageorghis's whole directorship, from 1963, and is not a count. It fits the licence numbers. Fehlmann presents it as a criticism; it is also a description of a lawful channel working as the law allowed.

The paper is easily separated from the object. The Leipzig researchers found that export permits "were often lost", with the result that objects tended to accumulate seals and numbers instead [5, p. 7]. Copies of the old licences are kept in the Department's archive, and the Department has confirmed licences that reappeared with objects on the market, among them a 1964 licence offered at Bonhams in 2014 and the export of a bowl sold by Kolokasides [6].

The licensed dealers and the state's own sales

The dealers licensed under the 1935 law went on trading after the invasion. A Cypro-Geometric Bichrome jug "purchased in Cyprus from the licensed dealer P. Kolokasides" was "exported under permit by the Cypriot Department of Antiquities in 1975", and a photocopy of the export licence still travels with it [7]. Petros Kolokasides of Nicosia, licensed since the 1930s, was still described in 1986 as "the art dealer and collector Petros Colocassides" when the Friends of the Leventis Municipal Museum visited him "to discuss the possibility of purchasing some medieval ceramics from him"; the museum paid for twenty-six pieces in four instalments [8, p. 21]. Those were medieval glazed wares, not ancient pottery, and the buyer was a public museum in Nicosia. The dealers' working methods, their returns and their stock are described in the entry on the period before 1974; nothing in the record shows the system changing between the invasion and 1996, beyond the shrinking stock of registered material it could lawfully sell.

The state sold as well. The Cyprus Museum had sold "duplicate" antiquities since the 1920s, and in 1983 Karageorghis described the channel as it then stood: "The Department of Antiquities itself has a Sales Register of items available at nominal prices: it encourages exports to universities, museums, and similar institutions, for educational purposes, not as souvenirs" [1, p. 364]. The sales were abolished in 1991 [11, p. 288]. Their history, the S.R. numbers they left and the case against them are told in the Cyprus Museum saleroom and in how the Cyprus Museum sold antiquities.

The state was also a buyer in these years. Among the government's measures against the illicit trade Karageorghis listed, in the same interview, the "purchase of objects which appear on the market (in Cyprus or abroad)" [1, p. 364]. The first such purchase after the invasion was a Late Bronze Age bronze stand, found by looters in 1972 and exported after 1974, which was traced near Frankfurt and "purchased with a grant from the Cyprus Government and Mr A. G. Leventis in 1978" [10, p. 67]. The purchases of the following decades are set out in the state as buyer.

Diplomats and diplomatic gifts

Diplomats had bought Cypriot antiquities in numbers before 1974. A licence of October 1972, No. 6403, covered 42 objects for the American diplomat William Crawford [5, p. 11]. After the invasion the Republic tried to keep diplomatic buying inside the licence system. In 1983 Karageorghis said that "education and enforcement of export controls are generally effective in the area under government control, although there has been some abuse of diplomatic privilege among the many individuals holding this status in Cyprus", and he named among the government's measures "circulars at regular intervals to members of foreign missions from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs" [1, p. 364]. A diplomat's purchase from a licensed dealer, exported with a permit, was lawful; one carried out under immunity without a permit was not, and the Director said in public that the second kind happened.

The state also gave antiquities away. Fehlmann's "diplomatic gifts" [4, p. 156] were licensed exports by the Republic itself. The practice survives in the law as it stands today, which still allows an export licence for "the gift by the President of the Republic to heads of state or the heads of international organisations or other personalities" [3, s. 27(2)(d)]. Such a gift is the one kind of export from Cyprus that still places an antiquity in private or foreign hands.

The 1996 amendment and what declared owners may still do

The amending law of 1996, Law 4(I)/1996, ended the lawful trade on the island. Section 26 now reads: "No person shall deal in antiquities", with a penalty of up to five years' imprisonment or a fine of up to €45,000 [3, s. 26]. Section 27 requires an export licence from a committee of the Director, the Curator of Museums and the Curator of Monuments, and allows it only for temporary exhibition, long-term loan to a museum, university or other institution, the study and scientific analysis of excavated material, sherds and samples, or a presidential gift; "no licence shall be granted for the export of a private collection" [3, s. 27(1)–(3)]. Unlicensed export carries up to five years' imprisonment, a fine of up to €45,000 or both, and forfeiture of the object [3, s. 27(4)].

The amendment did not end private ownership. Declared antiquities remained lawful to possess. The Minister may require a declared object for the Cyprus Museum, with fair compensation if it was acquired before 10 September 1964 and a payment for its care if acquired later, or may let the owner keep it on condition that it is not alienated, under the Minister's supervision [3, s. 33(5)]. A declared object may still change hands, provided both parties notify the Director within fourteen days [3, s. 33(4)], and the Director issues the lawful possessor a one-time licence in the prescribed form [3, s. 33(6)]. The 1996 law also opened a second declaration period: a person holding an antiquity missing from the 1973 lists incurred no criminal liability if he declared it to the Director within six months of the law coming into force [3, s. 33A]. A declared owner in Cyprus can therefore keep, inherit, give or sell an antiquity to someone else on the island under notice, but cannot export it and cannot sell it through a dealer. What owners abroad can do is covered in collecting Cypriot antiquities today.

The evidence against the lawful channel

A licence certified title and export. It did not certify how the object had come out of the ground, and for much of the registered stock the digging had been illicit. Sophocles Hadjisavvas, a later Director of Antiquities, said of the antiquities collected on the island before 1974 that they were "illegal in the sense that they all came from illicit excavations", as Samuel Hardy quotes him [9, p. 462]. Fehlmann places the same sentence immediately before his remark on the "thousands" exported [4, p. 156]. On this view the licences of 1974 to 1996 carried abroad, lawfully, objects that had been dug illicitly in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Hardy's figures are the strongest general evidence for it. Using a method he himself calls "crude" [9, p. 459], he found that "214 (67.08%) of the 319 objects" in two Louvre catalogues of Cypriot antiquities acquired before the conflict "were neither scientifically excavated nor found through survey or by accident" [9, p. 466]. The sample is one museum's holdings and it predates the period of this entry. It shows how much of the Cypriot material that left lawfully had no record of its finding; it does not show that any licence was improperly issued.

The licensed channel also ran beside an illicit one. The bronze stand of 1978 was looted in 1972 and "exported illicitly" after the invasion [10, p. 67]. A kernos looted from the Hadjiprodromou collection after 1974 was sold at Sotheby's in London in July 1982 and again in 2014 before the Department identified it; it went back to Cyprus in November 2016 [6]. Neither carried a licence. Karageorghis named Germany, Switzerland and England as the main markets and noted that none was then a party to the UNESCO Convention [1, p. 364].

The record answers these points in part. The licence was the Department's own instrument, applied to objects its officers had seen and registered, and copies of the licences are kept in the Department's archive [6]. The cut-off of December 1973 meant that nothing dug after that date could be licensed as part of a collection; only accidental finds the Museum declined could leave, on its decision [1, p. 364]. Nothing in the published record ties a licence of 1974 to 1996 to an object taken from the occupied north, and the Republic contested the one documented "export" from there [1, p. 363]. Karageorghis said in 1983 that "except for jewelry, fakes are virtually unknown" among Cypriot antiquities on the market [1, p. 364]; he was speaking of objects, not papers, and no forged Cypriot export licence has been described in print. What the licence system cannot do is change the conditions of the original digging, and this entry does not claim that it did.

What a licence of 1974 to 1996 means today

An object exported from the Republic between 1974 and 1996 with a Department licence, or with a lead seal stamped C.M. that matches one, left Cyprus lawfully. The licence records that the Department inspected the object, that it was registered by 31 December 1973 or released by the Museum, and that the state let it go. The Department can check a licence number against its archive, and a photocopy or a number on the object is worth keeping for that reason. Licences of these years were the last issued for the permanent export of private antiquities: after 1996 no private antiquity could be licensed for permanent export, so a Cypriot object that left the island after 1996 without one of the narrow licences now allowed did not leave lawfully. How the market abroad has worked since then is set out in the trade since 1996.

The licence answers the questions of title and export. It does not give a findspot, and it does not show that the excavation was lawful; for most registered material that is unknown, and for some of it the digging is known to have been illicit. An object whose history begins with a licence of 1974 to 1996 is in the same position as one exported under the 1935 law in the 1950s. It can be owned, sold and published abroad. An object that matches a 1973 registration card from a collection lost in the occupied north is a different case: it is stolen, whatever paper it carries now, and the Department of Antiquities in Nicosia is where to ask. The documents that support a lawful history, and their limits, are compared in lawful and illicit in the record.