Special Report: Church Treasures of Cyprus - Archaeology Magazine Archive


Special Report: Church Treasures of Cyprus	Volume 51 Number 4, July/August 1998
by Mark Rose

The thirteenth-century fresco of Christ Pantokrator ("All Sovereign") from the Church of St. Themonianos (The Menil Foundation) [LARGER IMAGE]

After the occupation of northern Cyprus by Turkish forces in 1974, looters stripped the region's churches, removing several dozen major frescoes and mosaics dating from the sixth to the fifteenth century, an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 icons, and thousands of chalices, wood carvings, crucifixes, and bibles. Recovery efforts by the Church of Cyprus and the Republic of Cyprus have resulted in the return of some pieces through acquisition, trial, and seizure.

A major break came this past October when Munich police arrested 60-year-old Aydin Dikman, a central figure in the looting and selling of the church treasures. The cooperation of Dikman's former associate, Dutch art dealer Michel van Rijn, with Cypriot and German authorities made the arrest possible. By his own account, van Rijn, who claims descent from both Rembrandt and Rubens and has been convicted in France of forging Chagall's signature, had realized the error of his ways and wished to make amends by helping recover the artworks.

In apartments owned and rented by Dikman, police found Cypriot frescoes, mosaics, and icons, ancient coins, Precolumbian pottery, stolen paintings, and an unauthenticated Picasso. Police estimate the artworks and artifacts to be worth more than $60 million. If convicted of possessing and trafficking in stolen goods, Dikman faces up to 15 years in jail in Germany. Cyprus has requested his extradition.

Dikman's participation in the depredation of Cypriot heritage in the occupied part of the island was suspected as early as 1982, when reporter Mehmet Yasin, in the Turkish Cypriot weekly magazine Olay, identified him as an antiquities smuggler. It was not until 1989 that the extent of his role became somewhat clearer through testimony in the Goldberg case, a legal battle in federal court in Indianapolis over Byzantine mosaics from Cyprus. That nearly nine years passed before his arrest can be explained partly by Dikman's efforts to keep a low profile, working through dealers and seldom meeting directly with those who purchased items from him. Furthermore, those who knew that he was selling looted Cypriot artworks did not reveal his identity to authorities out of fear of personal retribution, concern that antiquities would be destroyed to do away with evidence, or unwillingness to jeopardize potential future acquisitions.

There have been three major recoveries of church treasures, and in each case the artworks, particularly the frescoes and mosaics, have been damaged and are in urgent need of conservation.

The first recovery came in the mid-1980s when the Menil Foundation of Houston, with Cypriot government and church authority approval, purchased from Dikman the thirteenth-century frescoes of Christ Pantokrator ("All Sovereign") and the Virgin with the archangels Michael and Gabriel from the Church of St. Themonianos near the village of Lysi. In June 1983 Dominique de Menil, Walter Hopps (then director of the Menil Collection), and Yanni Petsopoulos, a London dealer acting as an intermediary, met Dikman in Munich and examined two fresco fragments in one of his apartments. Dikman claimed the frescoes were from a ruined church in southern Turkey that was bulldozed during construction of a resort. They suspected that Dikman was lying, and in late June, the foundation engaged Herbert Brownell, a former United States attorney general, to investigate the legality of the acquisition. Brownell sent an inquiry letter and photographs of the frescoes to eight countries in lands once part of the Byzantine Empire. On September 6, 1983, Cyprus replied, identifying them as coming from the Church of St. Themonianos. De Menil contacted Vassos Karageorghis, then director of Cyprus' department of antiquities. By November 11, an understanding was reached whereby the Menil Foundation would acquire and restore the frescoes on behalf of the Church of Cyprus, which would then lend them to the foundation for an extended period.

The fragments were sent from Munich to London, where conservator Laurence J. Morrocco worked on them. The fresco of Christ Pantokrator had been cut from the church dome in 26 pieces, the Virgin from the apse in 12. Restoring them was nearly impossible because there were no measurements of the original structure (the church, in a military zone in the occupied area, was considered inaccessible), and the fresco fragments had lost their original curvature. To reconstruct the dome and apse, it was first necessary to determine their exact size and shape, then the appropriate curvature could be restored to the fragments so they would fit together on the curved surfaces. The process took three and one-half years.

In November 1987, as the restoration was nearing completion, Morrocco traveled to occupied Cyprus and surreptitiously visited the church to measure the dome and apse. He described what he found in a 1991 account of his work:

It was very strange for me to see the place where the frescoes had come from. It was as if it had just happened: the saw cuts were still visible in the plaster left behind when the fragments were ripped off. I could see how the thieves had cut crudely around the circumference of the base of the dome, leaving the angels' ankles and feet on the wall. Small pieces of the fresco lay scattered around the floor amidst dirt, straw, and sheep droppings.

Once the frescoes were reassembled, decisions had to be made about treating the damaged areas. The saw cuts were restored as invisibly as possible, but the larger missing areas, such as those around the base of the dome and in the lower part of the apse, were filled in with a dark color.

In April 1988, the reconstructed dome and apse frescoes were packed into large crates for the flight to Houston. In November 1997, nearly 14 years after they were bought from Dikman, the restored frescoes, housed in a specially constructed chapel consecrated by Archbishop Chrysostomos I, were put on display. According to a deposition taken for the Goldberg trial, Petsopoulos had offered the frescoes to the foundation for $850,000; the final price has not been disclosed. The conservation costs, according to Cypriot sources, were about $1 million.

Sixth-century mosaic of the archangel Michael from the Panagía Kanakariá church (Permanent Mission of Cyprus to the United Nations) [LARGER IMAGE]

During their 1983 trip to Dikman's apartment in Munich, Hopps and Petsopoulos had noticed a mosaic rondel that the latter subsequently identified as coming from the Church of the Panagía Kanakariá at Lythrankomí. The Kanakariá mosaics, depictions of Christ, the Virgin, archangels, and the apostles decorating the church's apse, were created ca. 525-530. They are among the few sixth-century works to have escaped an eighth-century iconoclastic period during which such images were systematically destroyed in the Byzantine Empire. The church, in northern Cyprus, was stripped between the summer of 1976, when the priest was expelled, and 1979, when an English tourist reported to Cypriot authorities that it had been looted. According to Hopps' deposition for the Goldberg trial, Petsopoulos told him that later in 1983 he had urged Dikman to return the mosaic. According to Petsopoulos, Dikman gave him four rondels, some small pieces of mosaic, and a sack of loose tesserae, swearing that that was all he had. The mosaics were returned to Cyprus on November 30, 1984. Two rondels proved to be modern fakes, but the other two, depicting St. Bartholomew and St. Luke, and several fragments of the surrounding decorative frieze, were from Kanakariá. Badly damaged, these were placed in the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia after two years of conservation.

In 1988, Indianapolis art dealer Peg Goldberg bought four Kanakariá mosaics--the archangel Michael, the upper half of Christ as a child, and the apostles Matthew and James--from Dikman, van Rijn, and American dealer Robert Fitzgerald for about $1 million. Goldberg attempted to resell the mosaics to museums in the United States for $20 million, but J. Paul Getty Museum curator Marion True alerted Karageorghis. The Church of Cyprus and the Republic of Cyprus sued for their return in federal court in Indianapolis and won. In her testimony, Goldberg described the mosaics when she first saw them in person at the Geneva airport:

They were very dull and it was very apparent that they...had numerous fissures, or splits, in them, that they were just marginally held together with glue...they were so fragile that when I bent down to start to touch them, thinking maybe I was going to lift it up to look at the back, literally a piece...separated in my hand.

Conservators Catherine Sease of the Field Museum and Danaë Thimme of Indiana University, asked by the Cypriot church and government to assess their condition, concluded that the mosaics had been damaged in five discrete phases, beginning with their removal from the apse. The facing--a fabric and adhesive layer applied to a mosaic or fresco to reinforce it during removal, had been ripped off without dissolving the adhesive--loosening many tesserae and pulling off the surfaces of others. The mosaics cracked as they were flown, inadequately packed, from Munich to Geneva and then to Indianapolis. Restoration work, commissioned by Goldberg in an effort to make the mosaics salable, did further damage. Sease and Thimme's assessment, published in a 1995 article, is damning:

The restorer clearly did not understand the materials he was working on.... He knew nothing about the technology involved and does not seem to have felt that an understanding of it might have proved helpful in choosing a restoration treatment. Thus, the most fundamental aspect of the appearance of the mosaics, namely that they had all been mounted on curved walls, and therefore were meant to be curved, was ignored. Much time and effort went into producing as flat and rigid a surface as possible.

After this restoration, the mosaics were sent, in attempts to sell them, on flights across the Atlantic and within the United States, causing hairline cracks along earlier mends. In 1991, after Goldberg's appeal failed, they were returned to Cyprus. They are now in the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia.

Fifteenth-century frescoes from the Antiphonitis church seized in Munich include fragments from the Last Judgment, left [LARGER IMAGE], and the Tree of Jesse, a pictorial genealogy of the Virgin, right. [LARGER IMAGE] (Press and Information Office, Republic of Cyprus)

In February 1997, van Rijn approached Tasoula L. Georgiou-Hadjitofi, honorary consul of Cyprus in The Hague and representative of the Church of Cyprus for stolen art, offering to help buy back mosaics and frescoes. Van Rijn's first effort yielded the mosaic rondel of St. Thaddeus from Kanakariá, which he brought to the Cypriot consulate in The Hague on September 5. The following day he purchased, via intermediaries, 25 frescoes from Dikman for $75,000. Athanasios Papageorghiou, an authority on Byzantine art and advisor to the Church of Cyprus, identified the frescoes as coming from the Church of Christ Antiphonitis near the village of Kalogrea in northern Cyprus. Built in the twelfth century, it was decorated in the fifteenth century with frescoes of the Tree of Jesse (a pictorial genealogy of the Virgin) and the Last Judgment. In 1976, an English reporter informed the church that the frescoes had been removed; this was confirmed by an Anglican priest in 1979. That same year a diplomat brought to Cypriot authorities pieces of cloth from the church to which fresco fragments adhered, evidence of failed attempts to remove some of the paintings. Van Rijn then purchased an additional seven Antiphonitis frescoes for $49,000.

Having recovered 32 frescoes and one mosaic, Georgiou-Hadjitofi decided to move on Dikman. On October 10, police struck, raiding two apartments and arresting Dikman. Police hit a third apartment, rented by Dikman under a false name, on November 26. Among the artworks seized were more Antiphonitis frescoes and the St. Thomas Kanakariá mosaic.

The 32 Antiphonitis frescoes and the mosaic of St. Thaddeus recovered by Georgiou-Hadjitofi, which were temporarily exhibited in The Hague, were returned to Cyprus on December 22, 1997, and put on display in the Byzantine Museum. Conservation and possible reconstruction of the Antiphonitis frescoes is on hold until the additional pieces seized in Munich are released by German police. According to Papageorghiou, once the mosaic of St. Thomas is returned, the apse of the Panagía Kanakariá church may be re-created in the Byzantine Museum to give visitors an idea of what the mosaics looked like in their original setting.

See also "From Cyprus to Munich" from ARCHAEOLOGY Online.

Mark Rose is managing editor of ARCHAEOLOGY.