Mehmet Rasih Savarona

Mehmet Rasih Savarona was director of the Kyrenia branch of the Antiquities Department in the Turkish-held north. A report in the Nicosia weekly Olay, printed in the record of a 1985 US Helsinki Commission hearing, says he was removed from his post after a Department commission produced a 40-page report on how icons and antiquities had been smuggled³. The same report says criminal proceedings against him began in Kyrenia Castle, and quotes the public prosecutor Derviş Akter as saying that he was "getting ready to flee Cyprus" and the archaeologist Ayhan Mustafa as saying that Savarona had said he would go to Germany by car³.

Dan Hofstadter describes him as a former antiquities director for the Kyrenia District who "was said to have been embarrassed into early retirement". According to Hofstadter, the prosecutor accused him of altering the museum inventory and replacing valuable icons with worthless ones. The evidence of two museum guards and a police handwriting expert was inconclusive, and Savarona was not convicted¹. Hofstadter met him in Nicosia, where Savarona said he had retired of his own will¹.

Hofstadter also writes that there is "some evidence" that Ali Mehmet Ali introduced Aydın Dikmen to Savarona before the Kyrenia Castle robbery, and adds that, whether or not Savarona was responsible for that crime, Dikmen took away a number of prize items¹.