ART : Byzantine Crimes : Cypriot crusaders are rescuing holy icons from greedy global art thieves

Robed in black as he sat beneath a small wooden icon of the Virgin Mary, his graying beard just grazing the tip of his cross and his voice filling with passion, Father Pavlos Maheriotis appeared every bit the modern-day Crusader.

He sounded the part as well, recalling one of his finest hours as a Greek Orthodox priest--the day he stood at the front line of a historic, continuing battle thousands of miles away from his mountaintop monastery in a place called Indianapolis.

“When I was in the court defending our icons that day, I felt God very much near to me,” Maheriotis said, smiling as he recalled his testimony as an expert witness in a landmark art-theft case in the U.S. Southern District of Indiana.

“Of course, I feel pity for those who treat our icons as objects of commerce,” said the priest, who is abbot of Machaeras Monastery. “But at the same time, I feel like the first Christians when they were defending their faith.”

Such is the passion that the Cypriot church and the government of this tiny Mediterranean island nation now are bringing to bear in an international crusade to recover national Byzantine treasures long since plundered, and to preserve those that remain.

To the uninitiated, the icons at hand hardly seem worth all the effort. At first glance, the typical icon appears to be little more than a primitivist two-dimensional religious portrait painted on wood--a flat, emotionless postcard print of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary or one of the Apostles or archangels.

To the Cypriot faithful, however, the icon is a singularly powerful spiritual channel of Eastern Orthodoxy--a direct link to the saints, to Christ and to God himself; an object that, when kissed, stroked and venerated, as they are daily in every village of Cyprus, will bring the worshiper near heaven and possibly even bring about miracles on Earth.

And to international art dealers, who in recent years have realized millions of dollars by buying and selling hundreds of Cypriot icons through a global network, the icons are something else--vehicles to almost instant wealth.

“I know it is difficult to understand--the icons are so many things to so many different people,” said Athenasios Papageorghiou, Cyprus’ foremost icon expert, who recently retired as head of the government’s antiquities department.

Papageorghiou explained that his nation’s drive to recover and preserve Cypriot icons results from a mix of culture, chronology and crime.

Its seeds were sown in 1974, when the Turkish army invaded the northern third of the predominantly Greek-speaking island, largely to protect the Turkish minority from increasing attacks by the Greeks. But the invasion led to the formal and continuing division of Cyprus and, in ensuing years, the disappearance of hundreds of antiquities from the churches that the Greeks were forced to abandon in the north.

Compounding the problem, Papageorghiou said, is the changing taste of the international art consumer.

“For us Cypriots, it is the spirituality of the icon that gives it value,” he said. “But now is also a period when interest in religious art is being awakened throughout the world, particularly Byzantine art. Until 14 or 15 years ago, only a few people were dealing with Byzantine art. Now, almost every American university has studies in Byzantine art.

“Now, you can find icons in living rooms all over America, all over Europe, throughout the West--even in Japan. So, you see, the demand is now there, and it’s growing.”

Enter Aydin Dikmen, a mysterious and elusive Turkish businessman; Michel van Rijn, a flamboyant yet shadowy Dutch art dealer, and a colorful cast of international art smugglers and traders.

To the Cypriot government, they are a rogues gallery of art thieves who systematically plundered the Greek Orthodox churches in the north and then sold the treasures off piece by piece to satisfy the world’s new demand for icons and other Cypriot religious treasures. It was the same network, the Cypriots say, that led Father Maheriotis to Indianapolis to defend his icons in 1989.

Marios Evriviades, a Cypriot official who testified with Maheriotis in the landmark Indianapolis case, singles out Van Rijn as “the man who created the icon trade in the world,” and he explains how the plunder began.

“All of a sudden, Cyprus broke open with the invasion,” he said. “Immediately, Dikmen comes to northern Cyprus from Turkey. He knew the business partially. And Van Rijn knew the business theoretically and materially.

“At some point, it became very systematic, and it may even have been guided by experts’ advice on what to steal.”

Today, on the other side of the Green Line that separates the Greek south from the Turkish north, Papageorghiou said, “nothing is left in the churches. The icons were stolen, collected or exported.

“There are icons now in private collections in the United States, in Europe, all over the world. It is not so easy to find these, let alone recover them.”

Although the faithful of the Eastern church began creating icons as early as the 6th Century, and they were produced in Russia up until the Revolution of 1917, most surviving icons are Byzantine, from the period between the 10th and 15th Centuries. They are usually thought of as portable religious artworks painted on wood panels, but the term “icon” may also include mosaics.

Papageorghiou’s role in the battle to save the icons is largely to protect the thousands that remain in churches throughout the Greek portion of the island.

Armed with cameras and notebooks and helped, in some cases, by the skilled restoration team of the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus, he travels from church to church, occasionally rummaging through hidden nooks and storerooms, meticulously recording each and every icon on the island.

“It is a very slow process,” sighed Papageorghiou, who was curator of the government’s ancient monuments for 30 years until he retired last year to work full-time cataloguing icons for the church.

“First, you have to find the icons. Then you have to describe them, photograph them, sometimes sketch them. Some are covered with soot and dirt, which make them almost invisible. Others are smeared with so much lipstick and saliva from being kissed so many thousands of times. So they have to be cleaned first, then photographed, then recorded.”

Cleaning an icon is a complex process--sometimes a life-threatening one in this country where religious objects stir such passion. Papageorghiou told of a bishop near the southern city of Larnaca whose house was stoned for days by an irate congregation after the bishop agreed to send a single icon to the church workshop in Nicosia, the capital, for restoration.

The inventory is vital, Papageorghiou said, because others may yet be stolen and smuggled out of the country, and the ability to identify them will be important in court. In the years that preceded the Turkish invasion, the Orthodox Church never made a detailed and exhaustive inventory of its treasures.

Working through legal consultants and contacts who monitor major art auctions throughout the world, Cyprus is constantly on the lookout for any Byzantine icon that comes up for sale. When they are available, sketchy church records will be produced in an effort to prove Cypriot provenance. And if the government meets resistance, as it did in Indianapolis in 1989, it goes to court.

In many ways, though, the case of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Republic of Cyprus vs. Goldberg & Feldman Fine Arts Inc. was a rare victory.

The focus of the case was an extraordinary set of four 6th-Century mosaics that had been looted from the apse of the Kanakaria Church in the northern Cypriot village of Lythrankomi after the Turkish invasion.

In his decision, U.S. District Judge James Nolan stressed the value of not just the Kanakaria mosaics but all Byzantine icons that have survived, noting “their invaluable and irreplaceable significance to Cyprus’ cultural, artistic and religious heritage.” He ordered the two-foot-square mosaics returned to Cyprus, where they now are on display in Nicosia’s Byzantine Museum.

The facts of the Indianapolis case, filling thousands of pages of court records, documented the shadowy network of international art traffickers that was cited by Papageorghiou and Evriviades. And Judge Nolan’s decision was based largely on his determination that Dikmen had supervised their removal from the church and that Van Rijn had arranged their sale for just over $1.2 million to an apparently unsuspecting Indianapolis art dealer named Peg Goldberg, who then offered them for sale to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu for $20 million.

The Cypriots’ victory in Indianapolis was achieved through what the judge called their “organized and systematic effort” to recover the mosaics. But more important was the fact that the mosaics had been well-documented before they were stolen. In many other cases, the churches of Cyprus have yet to retrieve their lost treasures.

“An icon is a channel to the saints and a call for each individual to become a saint,” Maheriotis said as he sat at his Spartan desk at the monastery one recent afternoon. “When we see these icons, we in a way envy them and live the same way as they lived.”

Later, standing beside the ancient icon of the Virgin Mary that is the treasure of his monastery, he talked about its origin and its powers.

In the year 750, when the church was torn by a struggle over whether all physical representations of holy figures should be destroyed--the period of the Iconoclasts--a hermit brought the painting of the Virgin from Asia Minor to Cyprus to keep it safe. He hid it in a cave.

Two monks, arriving here from Palestine, saw a light coming from a mountainside. Drawing near, they heard a voice say, “Take a knife and cut the bush.” They did so, and there they found the icon. When the monastery was built on the site, it was called Machaeras, or knife.

Maheriotis pointed to the dozen or so tiny silver charms hanging from the maroon velvet drape over the icon. One was in the shape of a human eye, another a baby, another a foot--each pinned there by a worshiper who believed that an illness had been cured through a miracle of the icon.

An icon serves to concentrate people’s faith, Maheriotis said. “When one icon is venerated by many people with such a degree of faith . . . and they believe a miracle will happen, then a miracle takes place.

“We are not looking for miracles, and we are not encouraging people to look for miracles, because this is false faith. . . . The main miracle happens inside themselves.”

There are those in Cyprus who seek to prove that the icons themselves possess supernatural powers. Walter Zuest, a 68-year-old retired Swiss manufacturer, has spent the past two years using obscure instruments that include a pendulum and a divining-rod-like device called the Lechner Antenna to show that the icons are powerful generators of spiritual energy, which can be absorbed by worshipers merely by standing before them.

When asked about such theories, Maheriotis winced and shook his head. Papageorghiou just smiled.

“There are several icons that have healed illnesses and brought about miracles here,” Papageorghiou said. “But it’s not the icon. It’s the faith of the people. It’s the faith that creates this emotion, the healing, the miracles.”

Then he paused, thinking of the vast task at hand.

“Besides,” he said, “I’m not dealing with miracles. I’m just studying paintings.”