Comfort for Aphrodite

By B.C.

THIS week may yet go down in history as a happy moment for Cyprus, and in particular for relations between Cyprus and the authorities in Germany. No, I haven't taken leave of my senses, and that is not a misprint. In between all the gloomy news of the Cypriot banking crisis, there has been a landmark court decision in Munich which has very positive implications not only for the religious and artistic heritage of Cyprus but for all countries (think of Mali, Syria, Egypt, Iraq) where war or public disorder has provided opportunities for looting and trafficking in cultural objects.

In a thorny civil case, the Munich court upheld the claim of four Cypriot parties (the government plus the Greek Orthodox, Maronite and Armenian churches) for the return of 173 objects (including priceless mosaics, frescoes and icons) that were looted from churches in Cyprus during the late 1970s. The case isn't quite over, because the fate of 60 more objects has still to be determined, and an appeal to an even higher court is still technically possible. But a German lawyer acting for the Cypriots told a Munich daily, the Suddeutsche Zeitung (SDZ) that he hopes the objects will be back on the island by the end of the year.

In any case, a bizarre story which came to a head in 1997 seems to be nearing its end. On October 10th of that year, German police burst into a Munich apartment and several other premises owned by Aydin Dikmen, a Turkish-born art dealer, and seized thousands of large and small artefacts, of which the most important part originated in Cyprus. The operation was hailed as a victory in the battle against art smuggling; but ever since then, the confiscated objects have been languishing in a police vault in Bavaria as legal battles rage.

One of the objects that may soon go home is a 1,500-year-old mosaic, of the apostle Thomas, that was hacked from the wall of the Kanakaria church in the northern extremity of Cyprus, one of the oldest places of near-continuous worship in the world. In a landmark case in 1989, a court in Indiana ordered the return to the Cypriot church of four other mosaics from Kanakaria. Court documents showed how Mr Dikmen had sold the four mosaics to a ring of intermediaries who in turn sold them to an Indiana gallery owner. The Indiana case made American legal history, by invoking the principle that a thief cannot pass on good title, and the Munich case may be a similarly important moment in the legal history of Europe. It is not, by the way, a simple story of Greek heroes and Turkish villains. One of the first people to draw attention to the looting of Cypriot churches was a brave Turkish-Cypriot writer, Mehmet Yasin; and the very fact that there was an international market in mosaics and frescoes (in some cases visibly hacked out of walls) reflects the tastes and aspirations of wealthy dealers and collectors, some of them Greek.

The success of the Munich operation 15 years ago reflected a moment of co-operation between a strange mixture of parties: the German police, plus the late Archbishop Chrysostomos I of Cyprus who mandated the handling of the case to a lay woman, who in turn won the confidence of one of Mr Dikmen's erstwhile business partners. As the SDZ recalled on Tuesday, this unlikely posse managed to pull off one of the most spectacular sting operations in the annals of cultural detective work.

Later that spirit of co-operation collapsed, in part because of poor co-operation between different Cypriot agencies. One of the holdups has been German demands for tax from the money that Mr Dikmen made on the mosaics that were adjudicated in Indiana. But at the crucial moment, when Germans and Cypriots were co-operating in good faith and taking risks for one another, the results were impressive. Might there be a lesson there for the handling of the present crisis? I wonder.