Aydın Dikmen

The Lysi frescoes and the Kanakaria mosaics, both removed from churches in occupied northern Cyprus, passed through the same Munich dealer, Aydın Dikmen, and his name came before an American court in 1989 although he was not a party to the case^1,4,5.

Dikmen was born on 15 October 1937^9,10. Dan Hofstadter, who wrote Goldberg's Angel (1994) without ever reaching him, describes a young technical draughtsman and part-time jazz drummer in Konya who boasted to the journalists Pearson and Connor, in the late 1960s, that some of the finds from Çatalhöyük were in his house. Hofstadter writes that Dikmen began to make contacts in Cyprus in 1963; that in 1977 Turkish police traced a trunkload of icons, found on its way to Yugoslavia, to Atilla Önder, whom Hofstadter calls Dikmen's associate; and that the police raided Dikmen's villa in Konya the same year, after which he bribed his way back into good standing¹.

The Lysi frescoes

In June 1983 Dominique de Menil, Walter Hopps, Yanni Petsopoulos and the author of the Menil Foundation's published account met two Turkish men in a Munich hotel lobby, one of whom the account identifies as Dikmen. They were taken to a rented one-room flat without electricity, where an angel and a John the Baptist stood by candlelight and a crate held the cut plaster segments of the rest. Dikmen told them that his main business was buying derelict ships for scrap, and that the paintings came from a church uncovered by a bulldozer near Bin Bir Kilise in Anatolia, a story he supported with drawings, a 1971 book by Semavi Eyice and an export permit. The Menil party suspected he was lying².

The fragments, thirty-eight in all, came from a church at Lysi in the Turkish-occupied north^4,7. Cyprus claimed them on 6 September 1983. On 1 November the foundation resolved to redeem them through Petsopoulos for the Church of Cyprus, and the Council of Ministers and the Archbishop approved the arrangement on 29 December. Petsopoulos placed the funds in a Swiss escrow account, to be released to Dikmen after laboratory verification in London, and the fragments went from Munich to London in January 1984. A custody protocol of 24 March 1987 gave the Menil Foundation the frescoes for fifteen years from 1 January 1986, with return to the Church². At the Indianapolis trial Hopps testified that the foundation had withheld Dikmen's name from Vassos Karageorghis for fear of reprisal¹. According to Leah Marangos, the frescoes stayed at the Menil Collection until 2011, when Cyprus and the Church requested their return, and are now in the Byzantine Museum of the Archbishop Makarios III Foundation in Nicosia⁶.

Kanakaria and Indianapolis

The Kanakaria mosaics left their church in northern Cyprus between 1974 and 1979, and Timothy Kaiser wrote in 1990 that they apparently spent at least eight years in Dikmen's possession⁵. Marc Fehlmann calls Dikmen the mastermind of the theft³. According to Hofstadter, Peg Goldberg agreed on 3 July 1988 to buy four fragments for a little over a million dollars through the dealers Michel van Rijn and Robert Fitzgerald, and Ronald Faulk flew to Munich to escort Dikmen and the mosaics to Geneva, where she inspected four crates at the airport freeport on 5 July¹. Kaiser puts the price at $1.08 million, of which Dikmen received $350,000⁵.

The Church of Cyprus and the Republic sued for the mosaics in Indiana. On 3 August 1989 Judge Noland held that they belonged to the Church and found that Goldberg's inquiry into whether Dikmen had title to them had been inadequate^1,5. At the trial, counsel argued that Cyprus should have suspected Dikmen by 1982, when the Turkish Cypriot newspaper Ortam connected him with the theft of Christian art from Kyrenia castle; the court let the trial proceed¹. Marangos places the mosaics in the Cultural Centre of the Archbishop Makarios III Foundation⁶.

Dikmen's identity was itself disputed in the case. Cyprus's lawyer Tom Kline suggested he might be a construct, and Hofstadter, who never reached him, doubts that the man Goldberg met in Amsterdam in autumn 1989 and in Munich in March 1990 was the real Dikmen; Faulk later spoke of a "phony Dikmen"¹.

What others alleged

Hofstadter believes, in his words "almost certainly", that Dikmen's team stripped Lysi, Kanakaria, Ayios Giorgios, Ayios Varnavas, Panayia Theotokos, the Armenian church and the Antiphonitis monastery, though he thinks Dikmen was probably not present at most of the operations. He calls him "the most destructive art thief to appear in Europe since the end of World War II"¹. Derek Fincham, citing others, states that Dikmen organised a team of looters. He also reports van Rijn's description, given to the historian Michael Jansen, of frescoes cut into sections under gauze and plaster, and of Dikmen restoring and disguising icons and inventing histories of rescue for them; van Rijn had himself taken part in the Goldberg sale⁴. Marangos, quoting Jansen, calls Dikmen "the most active and influential international operator"⁶. None of these statements is a finding of a criminal court.

Munich and the returns

Hofstadter writes that German customs officers told him they had raided one of Dikmen's Munich apartments about 1990, found it empty after a tip-off, and sent a file on him to the Munich I chief prosecutor, who told Hofstadter that no such file existed¹. Fehlmann writes that the German authorities had enough evidence for a case of illegal possession of stolen art and antiquities, but that the limitation period had expired and Dikmen was released after some months in custody in Munich. He adds that neither the Turkish Cypriot nor the Turkish authorities have ever indicted him for the theft of the Kanakaria mosaics or of any other Cypriot antiquity³.

Marangos dates a raid on Dikmen's apartments to 1997. Citing O'Connell-Schizas, she writes that his three Munich apartments held antiquities worth 60 million euros, among them Cypriot frescoes, mosaics and icons, coins, pre-Columbian pottery and stolen paintings. She reports that the courts concluded that 173 items had left Cyprus after 1974 and belonged to the Republic, and that they were repatriated in July 2013⁶. Dikmen died in 2020¹⁰.