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Published: April 1, 1998
Nestled among rugged hills overlooking the Mediterranean near this ancient village, the Monastery of Antiphonitis once held some of the world's finest Orthodox frescoes and icons. Today it is deserted, and there is no trace of the masterpieces that once graced its walls.
To the northeast, at the Church of the Virgin of Kanakaria in the village of Lythrangomi, the scene is even more stark. Almost every window is broken, and rain and dust have poured into a building that once possessed some of the most important and beautiful works of early Christian art. Pigeons and rodents make their homes where the faithful worshiped for centuries amid works of mystic beauty.
These scenes reflect what European police investigators now say is one of the most systematic art looting operations since the Nazis plundered the countries they occupied during World War II. The looting of Greek Orthodox churches in northern Cyprus, where Turkish troops landed in 1974, has brought hundreds of magnificent artworks onto the international art market and, in recent months, led to a series of spectacular raids by the police in Germany.
For years, the whereabouts of many stolen artifacts from northern Cyprus has been a subject of rumor and speculation. The answer to some of these mysteries may now be found in a locked room behind the antique statuary and Renaissance paintings that fill the salons of the Bayerischer Landesmuseum in Munich.
That room holds a magnificent collection of stolen Greek Orthodox icons. Some are less than a foot square, while others are nearly life-size images of Jesus, the Apostles, and other holy figures. All display the beauty that has made such pieces treasured not only by the Orthodox clergy and faithful, but also by art collectors around the world.
This collection was recovered in October by the Bavarian police in the course of arresting Aydin Dikman, a 60-year-old Turkish citizen who has lived in Germany since 1961. The German authorities say he is one of Europe's most prolific art thieves. The trove includes more than 140 icons as well as 10 fragments of Byzantine frescoes depicting Jesus' disciples, carved wooden portals, silver crosses, prayer books and 250 other treasures from Orthodox churches on Cyprus.
The Munich collection, which is not open to the public but which the German police showed to a reporter, is part of a hoard of art treasures that officers found when they closed in on Mr. Dikman, who is accused of systematically plundering Cypriot churches. Appraisers have told the police that the fresco fragments alone would bring several million dollars apiece on the open market. The icon collection has been appraised at $3 million.
''This is the most spectacular case we have seen in Germany or perhaps all of Europe in many years,'' said Peter Kitschler, chief of the art-theft unit of the Bavarian police.
Although Mr. Dikman, who is in prison, refused to be interviewed by reporters for The New York Times who conducted a monthlong investigation of the Cypriot art thefts, the case being built against him by the German police sheds new light on the lucrative trade. It may also have effects beyond the art world, straining the already tense relations between Greece and Turkey and their respective allies on Cyprus. Greek Cypriots accuse Turkish Cypriot officials who rule the north of aiding and abetting Mr. Dikman's thefts.
''The Turks are waging a war against our cultural patrimony,'' said Demetrios Michaelides, associate professor of the University of Cyprus and head of its archeological research unit. ''They are trying to erase Greek and Christian heritage from the now largely Turkish, Muslim north.''
The Conquered Island
Disputes Wrapped In Ancient Hatreds
Turkish Cypriots deny such charges and accuse Greek Cypriots of working to deprive them of the resources needed to protect their mutual cultural heritage.
The art dispute comes as membership talks opened on Tuesday between Greek Cypriots and the European Union. Turkish Cypriots adamantly oppose the talks. Leaders of the Turkish Cypriot enclave threatened on Tuesday to merge with Turkey, a move that Greece has vowed to block at all costs.
Since time immemorial, Cyprus has been a prize sought by contesting nations, empires and religions. It was a center of early Christianity, and Ottoman Turks captured it from the Venetians in 1572 after a series of bloody sieges and mass killings.
Cyprus later became a British colony and remained so until 1960, when the British turned it over to what proved to be an unstable Greek-Turkish partnership. The island has been caught ever since in the conflict between Turkey and Greece, which is also a conflict between Islam and Orthodox Christianity.
When Turkish soldiers landed on northern Cyprus in 1974, after a coup engineered by the military junta then ruling Greece, Greek clergymen and custodians of Orthodox holy sites fled southward. A process of what both sides now call ''ethnic cleansing'' began on both sides of the border, with the southern two-thirds of the island becoming almost completely Greek and the northern third nearly all Turkish.
Turkish Cypriot leaders evidently felt little obligation to preserve Orthodox churches, which many viewed as remnants of rulers who had oppressed them. Over the next 10 years, Greek Cypriot officials say, the churches were looted of more than 20,000 religious artifacts.
The Remorseful Client
Guiding Officers To Their Quarry
The trail of the artifacts in which Mr. Dikman dealt stretches through Europe and the United States. It may extend to the Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, which may have unwittingly displayed several icons stolen by Mr. Dikman.
That assertion comes from Michel van Rijn, a central figure in the unfolding case, who says he was once Mr. Dikman's principal client. Since he fell out with Mr. Dikman, Mr. van Rijn, 47, a burly Dutch art dealer, has been trying to help the Orthodox and Greek Cypriot authorities reclaim some of the plundered items he helped sell to other dealers throughout the world.
One of the dealers with whom Mr. van Rijn says he worked is Serafim Dritsoulas, a Greek citizen who lives in Munich. In a raid on Mr. Dritsoulas's home several weeks ago, the German police found what they believe to be several more stolen icons from Mr. Dikman's collection.
Mr. Dritsoulas, who did not respond to several requests for comment, was a member of the ''expert committee'' that helped organize the Antwerp exhibition. Museum officials there said they would never knowingly exhibit stolen icons. But citing Belgian privacy laws, they also refused to say whether Mr. Dritsoulas had lent any of the allegedly stolen icons they displayed. Investigators said they expected to charge him with possessing stolen art.
In a series of interviews, Mr. van Rijn said that he never stole any Cypriot artifacts himself, but that he did help Mr. Dikman sell icons and frescoes that he said Mr. Dikman plundered from Cypriot churches and monasteries.
Mr. van Rijn said some Turkish military officers and local officials knew what Mr. Dikman was doing. With their knowledge, he said, Mr. Dikman hired and trained a team of sophisticated thieves; sent the team into northern Cyprus soon after the 1974 Turkish intervention with lists of precious frescoes and mosaics to be removed from church and monastery walls; stored his loot in Kyrenia Castle, a popular tourist site in the northern Cypriot port of Kyrenia, which the Turks call Girne, and finally sent it to Munich.
In 1988, Mr. van Rijn and Mr. Dikman sold four mosaics that had been stolen from the sixth-century Church of Kanakaria in Lythrangomi, one of the most heavily looted churches in northern Cyprus. The buyer, Peg Goldberg, an Indianapolis art dealer, paid $1.2 million for the mosaics and then tried to sell them for $20 million to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. A curator there recognized them and called the police. In 1989 an Indianapolis court, ruling that Ms. Goldberg had not tried hard enough to determine whether the mosaics were stolen, ordered their return to Greek-controlled Cyprus.
After that deal, a stint in a Spanish prison on fraud charges that Mr. van Rijn said were later dropped, and further quarrels with Mr. Dikman, Mr. van Rijn said, he decided to abandon the world of art theft and work to recover the objects he had helped fence. Last fall, he approached Tasoula Georgiou-Hadjitofi, the honorary Greek Cypriot consul in The Hague, and offered to recover three mosaics stolen from the Kanakaria church plus some 40 frescoes also in Mr. Dikman's possession. The Cypriot Government raised $500,000 from private sources and bought the items from intermediaries working for Mr. Dikman.
''I wept with joy when I recognized them,'' said Athanassios Papageorgiou, a former Director of Antiquities for Cyprus who flew from Nicosia to identify the objects.
Mr. van Rijn's bodyguard videotaped this and several similar transactions in what amounted to a sting, and turned his tapes over to the German police. In October, police teams raided the apartment where Mr. Dikman lived and two others he used as warehouses.
Within secret compartments behind walls, under ceilings and in basements, Mr. Kitschler of the German police said, were more than 4,000 objects from an array of ancient civilizations.
The police also found albums of photographs that appear to show how Mr. Dikman obtained some of the Cypriot treasures. Photos show workers standing on scaffolding and removing frescoes from walls.
There are also drawings of elaborate frescoes that disappeared from northern Cypriot churches during the 1970's and 80's. The drawings are bisected with lines that the police say showed workers where to cut the frescoes to preserve the faces of apostles and other figures.
The albums will be critical evidence in Mr. Dikman's trial later this year. Prosecutors said they planned to charge him with possession and attempted sale of stolen goods, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.
''This was professional work,'' Mr. Kitschler said. ''It involved making sketches, erecting scaffolding and bringing in specialized equipment. This kind of thing must have taken days to complete. It wasn't a matter of slipping into a church at night and sneaking out with something under your coat.''
The Enduring Hostility
Progress Mired In Political Strife
From his stronghold in Nicosia, the President of the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is recognized only by Turkey, denied that his government had in any way encouraged or tolerated looting of Orthodox sites.
''We only learned about Dikman's activities after his arrest,'' said the President, Rauf R. Denktash. ''He's not a part of us; he has nothing to do with us.''
Mr. Denktash said that his government was eager to protect Greek Cypriot monuments and churches, and was doing its best, ''given our limited resources.'' He said foreign governments refused to provide aid for preservation work because they did not recognize his authority.
''They told us to apply through the Greek Cypriot government,'' he said, ''which is unacceptable to us.'''
Visits to Greek Cypriot monuments and Orthodox churches in the north confirmed that the Denktash government had taken steps to preserve religious sites. It has spent thousands of dollars turning the Monastery of St. Barnabas near Famagusta into an exquisite icon museum, and has handsomely restored Famagusta's Gothic Cathedral of St. Nicholas.
But the Turkish military barred a reporter from visiting two revered sites that were reported to have been heavily looted, the monasteries of Chrystosomos and of Akhiropietos. And visits to the normally closed churches of Antiphonitis and Kanakaria revealed empty, dilapidated structures that no longer contained a single icon and were in desperate need of repair.
Several figures in the case agreed in interviews that hostility between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot authorities, and the use of charges and countercharges for political purposes, helped make the thefts possible and now complicate efforts to protect remaining treasures.
''We could work together to protect our cultural patrimony were it not for politics,'' a Cypriot cultural official complained. ''But if you quote me by name, I'll lose my job.''
