Özgen Acar

Özgen Acar wrote for the Istanbul daily Cumhuriyet, and in mid-1989 the paper ran his series on the looting of Cyprus. Dan Hofstadter, who thanks him for sharing many observations, describes him as a Turkish journalist who had made a study of Balkan smuggling routes¹. The series recalled that Aydın Dikmen had made Turkish headlines in March 1977 over 21 Cypriot icons exported illegally, and that Hürriyet had printed a photograph of Dikmen's private museum in Konya¹.

Hofstadter also reports that the Turkish Cypriot opposition newspaper Ortam traded information with Acar, and that about thirty unsigned Ortam articles on antiquities thievery in northern Cyprus appeared in late 1989¹. One of his informants told him that Dikmen was jailed in Konya after Acar's articles in Cumhuriyet and Milliyet¹.

With Melik Kaylan he wrote "The Hoard of the Century" for Connoisseur in July 1988 and "The Turkish Connexion", an investigative report on the smuggling of Turkish antiquities, in October 1990². On 15 September 1991 Cumhuriyet printed his article on antiquities seized by the Turkish police between February and September of that year; Janet Blake says he has done much to publicise the scale of the loss of antiquities from Turkey². In 2018 he contributed a chapter on Kyme and its jewellery to the Festschrift for Oscar White Muscarella⁷.