Mosaic of St. Mark
Well, the Indiana Jones of the art world, Arthur Brand, has done it again. This time he was able to rescue a precious mosaic long thought to be lost forever.
Cyprus, 1974
Turkish forces invaded Cyprus in 1974 and in the wake of this attack, as so often happens, there was massive instances of looting and smuggling priceless historical and cultural artifacts off the island. This was the case in the Panayia Kanakaria church in the town of Lythragomi, North Cyprus.
Between August and October 1976, looters entered the church and, using a pickaxe, hacked off almost an entire mosaic depicting Mary, Jesus, and saints and apostles from the apse of the church. This larger mosaic was then cut into smaller pieces to be sold. The smuggler took these pieces off the island and sold them on the black market, scattering them to all corners of the world.
Tracking them Down
In July 1988, a group of interested buyers (who knew these were looted mosaics) gathered in Amsterdam where a photograph was presented to them. “The group included the American art dealers Peg Goldberg and Robert Fitzgerald, as well as the Dutch antiquities dealer/smuggler Michael van Rijn and a Californian attorney named Ronald Faulk” (MOLA, 2026). After the meeting, Faulk travelled to Munich to meet with Aydin Dikmen, the Turkish dealer who actually had the physical mosaics for sale. Dikman produced papers that allegedly proved that the mosaics were legally exported from Turkish-controlled Cyprus, therefore Goldberg, van Rijn, and Fitzgerald all agreed to buy them from Dikman for $1,080,000.
Goldberg shipped the mosaics to Indiana and tried to sell them to the New York and Geneva-based art dealer Geza von Habsburg, who in turn offered them to the Paul J. Getty Museum’s antiquities curator Marion True. True is the first person with sense and/or ethics in this story because she declined to acquire them, suspecting they had been looted, and informed Byzantine art experts about the mosaics’ presence in New York.
In 1989, the Republic of Cyprus and the Autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus, after learning the mosaics’ whereabouts, tried to buy them from Goldberg for her purchase price and when that didn’t work the church filed a claim for their return. “Goldberg fought back, but her look-the-other-wayism was so egregious — the dealer claimed he had found the priceless mosaics “in an abandoned church,” she knew one of the middlemen was a convicted art forger, she only inspected the mosaics for a moment in the middle of the Geneva airport — that the US District Court for the Southern District of Indiana sided with the plaintiffs and ordered the mosaics returned to the Church” (The History Blog, 2018).
The claim was upheld by the U.S.A. and the works returned to Cyprus in 1991. However, not all the works were returned at this time. Remember how I said the big mosaic was chopped up? Well, only some of those pieces were returned to Cyprus in this repatriation and in the years that followed, there were many more searches and investigations into the still missing pieces. “One of the missing medallions, the one depicting the Apostle Thomas, was found in Dikmen’s possession during a police sting in October of 1997. Thaddeus was found the month before that. The hands of Archangel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary were found the month after that. More of them have been recovered since, leaving only two Apostle face medallions still missing” (The History Blog, 2018).
In 2014, the depiction of St. Andrew was discovered by the art historian, Maria Paphiti, she was preparing a client’s collection for exhibition when she came across a remarkable mosaic that her client had acquired in 2010. Paphiti told her about the origin of the piece and after some negotiation, the owner agreed to hand it back over to the Church of Cyprus for only a symbolic sum of money. So now the only outstanding mosaic head is St. Mark (there’s one more piece missing but we’ll get to that). That’s where Arthur Brand (finally) comes in.
So Arthur Brand and his TV show (The Art Detective) come on the scene around 2015. For three years he works on hunting down the last piece of this puzzle; St. Mark. He follows tips from his informants in legit and not so legit circles all with the support of the Church of Cyprus and the Cypriot government because they just want this all to be over.
Finally, in 2018 he reveals that after years of searching, St. Mark has been found in Monaco. The mosaic was purchased by a British family living there in good faith more than 40 years before. Not 100% sure I believe the “in good faith” piece, this is a stunning mosaic fragment, where do you think it came from?? Apparently they were horrified that it was a genuine historical artifact and agreed to return it to Cyprus in exchange for a small fee to cover the restoration and storage costs.
On Friday November 16, 2018 Brand handed over the mosaic of St. Mark to the Embassy of Cyprus in the Hague, Netherlands and on Sunday November 18, 2018 St. Mark was back home.
This only leaves one final piece of the entire mosaic still missing; the feet of Christ. Don’t worry though, Arthur Brand is on it.
Works Cited
“Last Looted Apostle Mosiac Returned to Cyprus”. The History Blog. 2018. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/53373
“Kanakaria Mosaics”. MOLA Museum of Looted Antiquities. 2026. https://mola.omeka.net/items/show/1147#:~:text=In%20the%20wake%20of%20the%20Turkish%20invasion,1976%2C%20looters%20removed%20four%20remarkable%20Byzantine%20mosaics
“Mosaic Looted from Cyprus Church Repatriated”. The History Blog. 2018. https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/51262