Antiphonitis Icons

Antiphonitis Icons

In 2013, Dutch authorities returned four Byzantine icons depicting the Apostles Peter, Paul, John and Mark to Cyprus in light of evidence they had been looted from the Church of Christ Antiphonitis and its associated monastery in Kalograia at some point in 1975.

Antiphonitis – like Kanakaria, Lysi, and many other Cypriot churches – was looted in the wake of the 1974 Turkish invasion of north Cyprus that pushed Greek Cypriot refugees south, divided the island, and left many sites of religious and archaeological importance unguarded.

The icons were acquired by a Dutch couple, the Lans, from an unidentified Armenian dealer who made a personal visit to the couple's Rotterdam home at some point between 1975 and 1977. It is likely that the unnamed Armenian dealer either worked for or with Turkish trafficker Aydin Dikmen, receiving the icons soon after they were smuggled out of Cyprus.

According to ARCA's Lynda Albertson, the Turkish dealer was Edouard Dergazarian, who worked closely with Michel van Rijn, a Dutch antiquities trafficker known to have help Dikmen market stolen icons from Cyprus.

When the Lans attempted to sell the objects at auction through Christie's in 1995, the auction house referred them to Cypriot authorities due to the items' suspicious provenance. The Lans then asked Cyprus's Honourary Consul to the Netherlands, Tasoula Hadjitofi, to consult a stolen-object database and help identify where the icons might have derived from.

The Cypriot government began a several-year legal battle for the return of the icons. In 2002 a Dutch court denied the restitution claim. The Minister of Culture of Cyprus Alekos Michaelides approached the Minister of Culture of the Netherlands Hans van Mierlo to petition for the return of the four icons.

The icons became the subject of a civil court case in Dutch Court that concluded in 2002. This was the first case for which the First Protocol to the Hague Convention of UNESCO was invoked, but due to civil law of the Netherlands of the time - and the fact that the Convention had been signed but not implemented - it was ruled to be non-binding for Dutch citizens.

In 2007, The Netherlands adopted new legislation, the Cultural Property Originating from Occupied Territory (Return) Act of 2007, citing the case of the Cypriot icons as the immediate reason for its enactment. Only with the passage of the law were the returns allowed to occur, and their repatriation took place after negotiations concluded in 2013.

The Antiphonitis icons, therefore, are important because their arrival in The Netherlands was deemed significant enough for a market country government to adopt national legislation.

4

Visual Work – paintings, frescos, mosaics

Byzantine

Christie's

Willem Otto Arie Lans

Cyprus

Damien Huffer

Jason Felch