Cyprus has put on display artefacts — some of them thousands of years old — that were returned after a Turkish art dealer looted them from the ethnically divided island nation decades ago.
Aydin Dikmen took the artefacts from the country’s breakaway north in the years after Cyprus’s split in 1974, when Turkey invaded following a coup by supporters of union with Greece.
The antiquities were kept in Germany after authorities there seized them in 1997, and protracted legal battles secured their repatriation in three batches, the last one this year.
Speaking at the unveiling ceremony at Cyprus’s archaeological museum, the country's president Nikos Christodoulides said the destruction of a country’s cultural heritage becomes a “deliberate campaign of cultural and religious cleansing that aims to eliminate identity”.
The 60 most recently returned artefacts put on display include jewellery from the Chalcolithic Period from 3500-1500 BC and Bronze Age bird-shaped idols.
Antiquities that Dikmen also looted but were returned years ago include 1,500-year-old mosaics of saints Luke, Mark, Matthew and James.
They are among the few examples of early Christian works to survive the Iconoclastic period in the eighth and ninth centuries when most such works were destroyed. Cypriot authorities and the country’s Orthodox Church have been hunting for decades for the island’s looted antiquities and centuries-old relics from as many as 500 churches in open auctions and on the black market.
The museum’s antiquities curator, Eftychia Zachariou, told the ceremony that Cyprus has in recent years benefitted from a shift in thinking among authorities in many countries who now opt to repatriate antiquities of dubious provenance.
