Aydin Dikmen Collection

Aydin Dikmen Collection

In 1998, German authorities raided the Munich home and storerooms of Aydin Dikmen (1937-2020), a 61-year-old Turkish citizen who had been living in Germany since 1961. Dikmen had gained a reputation as a notorious antiquities trafficker who assembled a stunning collection of Byzantine idols and mosaics in the years following the Turkish invasion of North Cyprus.

Dikmen's collection included more than 140 religious icons, as well as ten fragments of Byzantine frescoes depicting Jesus' disciples; carved wooden portals; silver crosses; prayer books; and 250 other items from Orthodox churches on Cyprus. Especially valuable pieces included 30 frescoes from the Antifonitis monastery and a unique mosaic removed intact from Kanakaria church.

He was regarded by other Turkish and foreign dealers as not only a prominent source of authentic objets, but also someone who "made great fakes." Dikmen has been connected to the network of individuals behind the alleged forgery of the so-called "stargazer" Anatolian Bronze Age marble figurines.

According to antiquities trafficker Michel van Rijn (a client of Dikmen's), in the wake of the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Dikmen hired and trained a team of sophisticated thieves to take advantage of the unrest by stealing antiquities from poorly-guarded churches and monasteries. He sent these individuals into northern Cyprus with lists of known frescoes and mosaics to locate and remove, then stored this loot in Kyrenia Castle before sending it to Munich.

In 1988, van Rijn worked with Dikmen to sell four 6th century mosaics from the Church of Kanakaria to American dealer Peg Goldberg, who bought them in Switzerland for USD $1,200,000 and tried to sell them to the J. Paul Getty Museum for USD $20,000,000.

Getty Museum curator Marion True refused to buy the mosaics, informing the sellers that the Getty "did not collect mosaics." True then notified Cypriot authorities and later testified on behalf of Cyprus, helping secure their return to Cyprus in 1989.

After these events, Van Rijn claims he had an attack of conscious and decided to assist authorities to recover other previously fenced items instead. He reached out to Tasoula Georgiou- Hadjitofi, the honorary Greek Cypriot consul in The Hague, and helped her recover three additional mosaics stolen from the Kanakaria church, in addition to at least 40 frescoes also known to be in Dikmen's possession at the time. The Cypriot Government raised USD $500,000 to buy the items from intermediaries working for Dikmen.

Van Rijn submitted evidence of that sale to German police, who launched an eight month long sting operation against Dikmen that culminated in raids on several of the apartments he had rented under various false names. These raids recovered more than 4,000 objects from Anatolian prehistoric and historic time periods, as well as photographs showing in-progress looting of some of the mosaics.

In October 2014, German authorities returned 173 of the looted antiquities to Cyprus. In March 2015, a Munich appeals court ruled that another 34 objects would be returned to Cyprus from the Dikmen seizures. Peter Kitschler, chief of the art-theft unit of the Bavarian Police, noted, "This is the most spectacular case we have seen in Germany or perhaps all of Europe in many years."

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Visual Work – paintings, frescos, mosaics

Religious Work – crucifixes, shrine objects, icons, religious texts

Byzantine

Cyprus

Damien Huffer

Jason Felch