Greece returns 48 Cypriot antiquities an ambassador acquired on the island in the 1960s and 1970s

Forty-eight Cypriot antiquities held in a private collection in Greece were handed back to Cyprus at a ceremony in the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia on Monday 1 June 2026. Lina Mendoni, the Greek Minister of Culture, gave them to Dr Vasiliki Kassianidou, Cyprus's Deputy Minister of Culture, and the Deputy Ministry announced the return the next day.

Pots and figurines from the Zacharakis collection

The group consists of pottery and limestone figurines. The Deputy Ministry dates them from the Early Bronze Age to the medieval period and says they were acquired in Cyprus in the 1960s and 1970s. They belonged to the Greek ambassador Christos Zacharakis. After his death his heirs gave the entire collection to the Greek state, asking only that its origin be looked into and the objects sent back where they belonged.

Kassianidou thanked the heirs for looking after the antiquities and for handing them over of their own accord.

The legal basis

Mendoni said Greece was returning the objects under the 1970 UNESCO Convention and a bilateral agreement she and Kassianidou had signed about eighteen months before, and that both countries had suffered the plunder of their heritage. She was in Nicosia for an informal meeting of European Union culture ministers held during Cyprus's presidency of the EU. Kassianidou thanked Mendoni and the Greek authorities, among them the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, and called the return "a tangible example of how the protection of cultural heritage is put into practice" (our translation).

Earlier returns from heirs

Other recent returns to Cyprus have begun the same way, with a collector's death and an heir's decision. On 26 July 2024, 37 vessels and clay lamps came back from Stuttgart. A German citizen working at the German Embassy in Cyprus had taken them from the island between 1964 and 1968; after his death in 2023 his heir contacted the Cypriot embassy in Berlin. The returns of 2023 to 2026 are listed in repatriations 2023–2026, and owners and executors considering the same step can read the guide to returning or donating Cypriot antiquities.