Organised Cases in the South: Souskiou, the Limassol Ring of 2010, Peyia and Operation Pandora

Most illicit digging in the Republic-controlled south of Cyprus after the Turkish invasion of 1974 was done by single finders near known sites, and it is described in chance finds and opportunistic digging. A small number of cases were larger: digging that returned to the same cemetery season after season, a group with tools, books and price catalogues, and houses holding hundreds of objects. This page sets out each of those cases as an event, with its date and place, what was seized, what the police and the Department of Antiquities said, and what is known of the outcome. No suspect is named, because none of the published reports records a conviction. The cases are few, and the reasons they are few, and the evidence that the record misses some of them, are set out after the cases themselves. The photograph at the head of the page shows the ruins of the abandoned village of Souskiou, in the Dhiarizos valley a few kilometres north of Palaepaphos, beside the Chalcolithic cemeteries that were the first southern target after 1974.

Souskiou, 1974 to 1979

The cemeteries at Souskiou are the source of the finest picrolite cruciform figurines of the Middle Chalcolithic, the iconic images of the period for which the south-west of the island is known [5, p. 1]. They were known to looters long before 1974. Edgar Peltenburg writes that Souskiou "has been known to looters since at least the middle of the last century", and that when the Laona cemetery was noted in 1972 it showed 14 "visible and empty tombs" [5, p. 1]. Karageorghis believed that the picrolite figurines and pendants of the Hadjiprodromou collection, formed in Famagusta before 1974, came from tombs at Souskiou-Vathyrkakas, which "before 1974 ... suffered at the hands of looters" [11, p. 58]; that collection's later loss in the occupied north is told in the Hadjiprodromou collection.

The digging went on after the invasion. Reviewing the evidence for the later prehistory of Cyprus at the end of the 1970s, Peltenburg wrote of the growing body of cruciform figurines, "many of which came from illicit digging at Souskiou (1974, 1975, 1979)" [4, pp. 15–16]. Sophocles Hadjisavvas of the Department of Antiquities surveyed Laona in 1975, ahead of a land consolidation scheme, and "discovered looted tombs" there (his survey; [5, p. 2]). The village of Souskiou has been abandoned since 1974. Local informants told the later excavators that its residents had done the looting, but the excavators found that "looting had been ongoing", helped by the site's isolation: during their six seasons at Laona between 2001 and 2011 there were three attempts, and the team camped on site overnight and disguised tombs with debris when they were away [5, p. 1]. Peltenburg's judgement on the whole history is that recent attempts "appeared therefore to be opportunistic but had certainly been undertaken more systematically during the 20th century" [5, p. 1]. The volume's conclusion calls the Souskiou cemeteries, before systematic excavation, "some of the most pillaged sites on the island" [5, p. 447].

Nobody was charged for the digging of the 1970s in any published record, and nobody knows who bought the figures. What the record shows is repeated, knowledgeable digging at one place for one class of object, by people who knew where the tombs were and what was in them. The later excavations, first by the Department in the 1990s and then by the Edinburgh team (Souskiou excavations from 1992), recovered intact burials beneath the looters' spoil, because, as Peltenburg notes, individual looting episodes "were largely haphazard and less than thorough" [5, p. 1].

The Limassol and Paphos ring, January 2010

On 26 January 2010 the Cyprus Mail reported that the police had broken up an antiquities smuggling ring, "possibly the largest" such case in the island's modern history [1]. Nine people had been arrested and remanded, and four more Cypriots and a Syrian were being sought. One of those arrested was a retired police officer. Reports abroad, after the Canadian Press, gave ten arrests and said the case began when one of the group offered objects to a buyer who turned out to be an undercover Greek policeman, after which the Greek police alerted Cyprus; a police spokesman was quoted calling it "the biggest antiquities smuggling bust in Cyprus history" [2].

The police found over 100 artefacts, among them statuettes and urns, with a large number of coins and seals, photographs of other objects not yet recovered, and a pistol. The material came "from the Limassol and Paphos areas" and not from the occupied north [1]. The police described the group as "both well-organised and educated": they held excavation tools, archaeology books and catalogues listing antiquities with estimated market values, and some of them had allegedly sold to commercial middlemen, one of them a Greek national [1]. A miniature gold coffin among the finds was, in the Director of Antiquities' view, not Cypriot at all [1].

Two officials spoke. The Director of Antiquities, Maria Hadjicostis, said the haul included many Bronze Age Cypriot antiquities and that "They are significant artefacts", and she added: "From what we have seen rare antiquities are not included" [1]. The minister then responsible for the Department, Nicos Nicolaides, said: "Indeed there is theft going on at quite a developed level", pointing to the whole island as a target area [1].

The police put the value at "about €11 million" [1]. The figure of $15.5 million that appeared abroad [2] is the same police estimate converted into dollars, not a second valuation. No report of charges, a trial or sentences in the case has been found, and the names of those arrested were not published.

What the €11 million measured

A police valuation is not a price. Divided among a little over 100 objects, €11 million comes to about €100,000 an object. In our own unpublished research on public auction results, the median sold Cypriot vessel made about $820 (2,168 sold lots; the middle half between $350 and $1,900), about 3% of sold Cypriot lots reached $10,000, and under 1% reached $50,000. The haul as the police described it, Bronze Age pottery, statuettes, coins and seals with "rare antiquities" excluded by the Director, belongs at the bottom of that range, not the top.

Marc Fehlmann, writing from Eastern Mediterranean University in occupied Famagusta in an openly polemical chapter, made the same point in stronger words: "This valuation is obviously nonsense", and "If Cypriot police forces are successful, their chief constables always exaggerate the market value of the items seized"; €11 million of Cypriot antiquities, he wrote, "would constitute several truckloads of sculptures, pottery and other objects" [3, p. 158]. His tone is his own and his wider argument is set out on the economics of looting. The arithmetic does not depend on him. The case was real and the group was organised; the figure measures what the police thought the haul was worth, and it should be quoted as theirs.

Peyia, 2014

On 27 February 2014 Paphos CID officers, acting on a tip, searched the house of a 58-year-old man at Peyia, north of Paphos [6]. They found 58 amphorae, 20 gold objects and six bayonets described as Hellenistic, five early twentieth-century firearms, a Kalashnikov rifle, a metal detector, coins, jewellery, gold chalices and €9,411 in cash. The man, according to the Cyprus Mail report quoted by the ARCA Blog, "could not provide convincing explanations as to the provenance of any of the objects" [6]. The Department of Antiquities examined the material ahead of a trial before the Paphos District Court [6]. No outcome has been found. Amphorae in such numbers are more likely to come from the sea-bed than from tombs, and the weapons and cash make the house as much a police matter as an archaeological one. The case is one man's hoard, not a network.

Operation Pandora in Cyprus, 2016

Operation Pandora was a Europe-wide police operation organised through Europol, in which twenty EU member states, UNESCO, Interpol and the United States took part; Cyprus and Spain coordinated it [7, 8]. The Cyprus Police gave its local results on 12 November 2016, for searches between 7 and 11 November [7]. There were 44 searches of homes and premises in every district, and 1,383 objects and 13 metal detectors were seized [7, 8]. Customs found 40 objects at post offices, reported by The Art Newspaper as the post office at Larnaca [7, 8]. Checks on 336 vehicles crossing to and from the occupied north, and on more than 30,000 pieces of luggage at the airports, found nothing [7].

Three men and a woman were arrested in raids on three properties in the Limassol area [7]. A house at Pissouri held 1,145 clay pots and other objects of metal and stone, from the Chalcolithic to the Roman period. A house at Erimi held 157 objects, prehistoric, Hellenistic and Roman, with church art among them. A house at Mouttagiaka held 22 Roman and early Christian copper coins [7]. One man held a licence from the Director of Antiquities for a collection; the police said nine of the registered objects were missing and that he could not account for them, and he was remanded together with a large number of objects held without a licence [7]. No published outcome has been found. What Pandora found in Cyprus was possession, not a digging ring: large undeclared holdings in private houses, one of them alongside a declared collection.

The cases side by side

Why one ring in fifty years is the exception

The ordinary record is of small cases. A parliamentary answer of May 2018 listed 67 complaints for 2012 to 2017: 35 of looting of tombs and sites, 27 of seizures and thefts, and 5 of metal detectors. Police investigated 59 cases and sent 31 to prosecution, four of them concerning Kouklia; by December 2017 three people had been sent to prison in two cases, two had received suspended sentences, eleven had been fined and two fined with a bond [9]. That is the profile of single diggers and householders, not of rings, and the entry on chance finds sets it out in detail. How the police and the Department pursue these cases is described in policing and monitoring. Against it the 2010 ring stands alone: no second southern group with tools, books, price lists and a foreign outlet has been reported since.

Three conditions kept it so. The Department of Antiquities kept control of the south's sites, museums and stores after 1974, and continued to excavate at the places looters favoured, Souskiou among them. The police could act on tips and did, at Peyia in 2014 and at Kouklia repeatedly. And the market for what a southern digger could find was small: the Director said of the largest haul ever seized that it held no rare pieces, and the prices set out above leave little in ordinary pottery for anyone below the middleman.

The occupied north after the Turkish invasion is a different scale of problem. There was no functioning Department of Antiquities there after 1974, and the Council of Europe's account distinguishes early opportunist raids from organised removals of selected targets between 1977 and 1982, most of them church art: the mosaics, frescoes and icons whose sale ran to hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece. The network the sources attribute to that period moved material through Turkey to Munich, where a large stock was seized in 1997. The record is set out in opportunist raids, 1974 to 1977, organised looting, 1977 to 1982, the Ankara airport seizure of 1981, the Munich seizure of 1997 and the decline after 1997, and the difference between church art and archaeology in church art and antiquities. In the south, the organised cases are a handful of events across fifty years, all of them found and reported by the Republic's own police.

The evidence against the page's point

The cases on this page are not the work of farmers who struck a tomb with a plough. Souskiou was dug in three separate years between 1974 and 1979 for the class of Cypriot antiquity that fetches the highest prices: a single picrolite figure sold for €448,250 in Paris in 2003, and small ones still make tens of thousands of dollars. The 2010 group worked with archaeology books and price catalogues and had a retired policeman among them, and the minister of the day spoke of theft "at quite a developed level" [1]. That is knowledgeable, targeted digging for the market, in government-held territory, after 1974.

The record also undercounts. The 2018 figures cover only cases that came to the authorities' notice [9]. In the Kourris valley in 2008 residents spoke of "dozens" of plundered tombs; the Director of Antiquities at the time, Pavlos Flourentzos, said that "The illegal antiquities trade is a problem in Cyprus, even in the non-occupied part", and no arrests were reported [10]. None of the larger cases on this page has a published outcome, and the 2017 convictions were mostly fines [9]. Before 1974 Greek Cypriots in government-held villages dug as well as Turkish Cypriots, as set out in collecting under the silent accord, and the Souskiou digging shows the habit outlasting the invasion.

The record answers these points in part. The targeted digging at Souskiou is attested in the 1970s and was opportunistic by the 2000s, in the excavators' own words [5, p. 1]. The one ring with the marks of organisation was found, broken up and reported, and the official who knew its contents best said they included no rare pieces. Under-recording is real, but in the south it is limited by an Antiquities Department, a police office and courts that worked throughout. What the evidence does not support is any claim that the south was free of organised digging: it was not, and the cases above are the proof.

What this means for an object on the market today

A picrolite cruciform figure with no history before the late 1970s may come from the Souskiou digging of 1974 to 1979, or from the looting there before 1974, and nothing in the object itself will show which. The documents that settle its history are an export licence, a registration card of 1973, a museum record or a published sale before 1974. The material seized in 2010, 2014 and 2016 was held by the Republic's police and passed to the Department of Antiquities; none of it is known to have reached the market. For ordinary Bronze Age and Iron Age pottery, the cases on this page are not evidence that a given pot was looted: the lawful stock abroad is far larger, as set out in how many Cypriot antiquities left lawfully, and the documents that support a lawful history are described in lawful and illicit in the record.