Lysi Frescoes

Lysi Frescoes

In 1983, a Turkish dealer in Munich named Aydin Dikmen offered to sell 38 fragments of two 13th century Byzantine frescoes to the American collector Dominique de Menil.

The frescoes had been looted a few years earlier from a small chapel outside the town of Lysi, Cyprus after Greek Cypriot refugees fled south in the face of Turkish invasion in 1974. It contained frescoes depicting Christ in heaven surrounded by 12 angels, as well as the Archangels Gabriel and Michael flanking the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. Looters cut the frescoes into pieces to removed them from the dome and apse before smuggling them to Munich. Upon receipt, Dikmen created a false provenance describing how they'd been discovered in a private home in Anatolia, Türkiye.

This was the provenance Dikmen provided to Menil as she stood in a warehouse in front of several of these mechanically sawn fragments. She suspected the story of the Turkish home was a cover, and told Dikmen she wanted to take pictures of the frescoes while she pondered her decision to buy them. Over the next year, her researchers tried to determine the original source of the frescoes and eventually linked them to the ceiling and walls of a chapel in Lysi, Cyprus.

After determining that Cyprus was the rightful owner, Menil then contacted the archbishop responsible for caretaking the looted chapel and offered to 'ransom' the frescoes and have them professionally restored. In return, she asked to display them in Houston before repatriating them to Cyprus. This plan was approved, and in 1984 Menil acquired the frescoes from Dikmen for approximately USD $1,000,000.

The Menil Foundation in Houston built a Byzantine Fresco Chapel at a cost of USD $4,000,000 to display the frescoes in a way that, according to architect Francois de Menil, "honors the spiritual significance of the frescoes without creating a mere replica of their original home." They remained on display from 1997 until 2012, when they were voluntarily returned to the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia, Cyprus under the terms of the agreement.

Several of the other frescoes looted from the Lysi Chapel eventually surfaced on the market via Dikmen and were returned to Cyprus.

2

Visual Work – paintings, frescos, mosaics

Byzantine

Dominique de Menil

Menil Collection

Cyprus

Jason Felch

Damien Huffer