Sacred and Stolen

by Gary Vikan

  One disturbing insight came quietly in the curatorial offices at Dumbarton Oaks, probably in late 1982 or early 1983, as I researched the icons I had already chosen for the show in order to write the labels. There were three icons in our selection of twelve—one then belonging to a dealer and the other two to a private collector—that, through a combination of stylistics and technical qualities, I suddenly realized were unmistakably from Cyprus.

  Moreover, the dealer-owned icon was part of a group of at least six that I was certain all came from the same iconostasis somewhere on that island. And as for the other two Cypriot icons, I was convinced that they had specific links to a well-known Byzantine church in the village of Asinou. Although I was then not yet fully aware that the invasion of northern Cyprus by Turkish forces in the summer of 1974 had unleashed a wave of looting of Orthodox churches, that possibility had begun to enter my thinking.

  The other disturbing insight came earlier, in the spring of 1982, when Susan Boyd and I flew to Boston with the Saint Peter icon to have it examined in the conservation laboratory of Harvard University. (Dumbarton Oaks did not have its own lab, but rather depended on its parent university for expertise.) Saint Peter was placed on an easel in bright daylight and, for the first time since the previous October in the Amsterdam airport, I examined him up close. I was struck even more this time by the absence of an inscription, but this now suddenly made sense to me, as I examined the cracks in the paint layer in the area of the saint’s hair. There are many cracks, in rows, and they are wide and go through the paint layer. This happens with the aging of any paint surface and with the flexing of the wooden support panel over time, especially with changes in temperature and humidity. And given that Saint Peter is seven hundred years old, this is hardly surprising, and in fact does not detract from the overall aesthetic impact of the piece.

  But what seemed to me very odd was something that I had noticed earlier but had not understood: Those wide rows of aging cracks in the area of the hair were all filled in with what appeared to be a red sealing-wax-like substance. It was now obvious to me that this fill could only be understood as the residue of a painted overlay of the entire panel as if it were the silt left in gutters after a flood. So as I envisioned Saint Peter covered over with this red “stuff” and then cleaned, the absence of the saint’s name finally made sense to me. As the red material was removed, not only did a residue remain in the cracks, the saint’s name was removed in the cleaning process. This happened not because the conservator who did the work wanted to remove it but because it was impossible to save it, given that the letters were written over the hard, slick surface of the icon’s gilded background.

  This all suddenly made perfect sense to me, given that the British Museum Saint Peter, which was discovered on the back side of a 17th-century icon beneath a layer of whitewash and varnish, was also missing its name. Yet, there are several lines of surviving Greek letters on the scroll the saint holds, precisely because they were added over a paint surface as opposed to the slick surface of the gilding. (By then I knew that both Saint Peters were cleaned and “un-named” by the same London conservator.) At last it was obvious to me not only why the Dumbarton Oaks Saint Peter had no name, but even more important why it had no history, and I now knew how it made its way undetected from the Balkans to Amsterdam. Like the British Museum Saint Peter, it was covered over with paint and thus remained invisible during its travels.

  My initial response to this realization was positive—that is, until it occurred to me that there was a basic difference between the two over-painted Saint Peters. The one that the British Museum was about to buy had been drastically cut down and the nose of the saint was all but destroyed, which means that it was not devotionally functional. So it made perfect sense that it would be painted over and that a new icon would be painted on the panel’s back side. The Dumbarton Oaks Saint Peter, by contrast, was in very good shape except for some minor damage to the areas around the saint’s right hand. And there was no later icon painted on its back side. That means that by all appearances it was devotionally functional before it was covered over.

  This likelihood raised two uncomfortable questions: Was the DO Saint Peter painted over not for religious purposes (to make a new icon) but rather for commercial gain to disguise its identity so that it could travel across borders and be sold with no history? And if that were true, maybe it was seen or even photographed before that over painting? What little I then knew of the Dutch dealing duo, Michel van Rijn and Robert Roozemond, suggested to me that commerce and not religion might be at work. And I was right. In his 1994 autobiography, Hot Art, Cold Cash, Michel van Rijn admits that indeed, he had the DO Saint Peter painted over to mask its identity and origin so that he could smuggle it out of Greece. Then in the mid-90s, two Greek scholars, in publications devoted to the icons of the northern Greek city of Veroia, both claimed that the DO Saint Peter had been stolen from the Church of Saint Prokopios in that city in the late ’60s or early ’70s. (As of this writing, the outcome of these claims is still pending. In the meantime, that “fast and loose” icon collector from San Francisco returned six of his icons to Cyprus, amicably, in 2007.)

  In the conservation lab at Harvard in the spring of 1982, I recall more a sense of excitement at solving the name puzzle than a sense of anxiety borne of that solution, namely, that Saint Peter made its way to the art market incognito. After all, in this case there was no connection to Cyprus; neither Greece nor Yugoslavia were then offering any evidence that Saint Peter had come from one of its churches, and the beloved Manolis Chatzidakis said DO should make the purchase. I then had only a vague sense that Michel van Rijn was the notorious character that I eventually discovered him to be. Also, I drew special comfort from the fact that many of the players on both the dealing and the collecting sides were not only sympathetic to the Orthodox cause; they were themselves Greeks.

  Certainly, there was plenty of “gray” to this Saint Peter transaction, but I never felt it shaded to black. I never felt I was doing anything morally wrong, much less illegal. Nor did anyone around me in those days speak in those terms. And in any event, a more pressing issue was about to be sprung on me—one that would dwarf my concerns about Saint Peter’s disguise and ultimately envelop this icon and its story in a much broader conspiracy of art theft and smuggling that would eventually bring me to the witness box of a federal trial in Indianapolis.

  Chapter Six

  “Call After Midnight, Paris Time”

  Fast forward five years, from that April 1983 exhibition opening at Dumbarton Oaks to August 9, 1988. I had just come back from lunch to my office (I was now chief curator at the Walters) to discover two telephone messages: one from Souren Melikian, a columnist for the International Herald Tribune, whom I had met two years earlier, and the other from Dominique de Menil, with whom I had not spoken in more than five years.

  Dominique’s message let me know that the topic was “the frescoes.” Of course, I called her first. Dominique told me a stirring tale of how frescoes depicting Christ in the dome and the Virgin Mary in the apse had been plundered from a chapel near the village of Lysi in northern Cyprus after the Turkish invasion of 1974 and cut into thirty-eight sections for piecemeal sale. She went on to say how in she had worked out a deal with the help of Yanni Petsopoulos to purchase the fresco fragments and restore them for eventual return to Cyprus, and how the restored frescos were now in her new museum in Houston, ready for the world to see.

  Dominique recounted this amazing narrative as if she didn’t know what we both knew: that I was well aware of almost all of this, and that it was through me, five years earlier, that her curator had made the connection to Petsopoulos and the frescoes in the first place. The only new information was that the reassembled frescoes had finally been shipped to Houston, and the Menil Foundation had gone public in a press release issued the previous Sunday. Dominique concluded by saying that I should expect a call from Melikian; he would be doing a story for the Herald T
ribune and she suggested that he talk to me.

  I recall feeling a certain bemusement at the role Dominique de Menil had chosen for me, since there had never been any acknowledged connection at the Menil Foundation between me and those looted frescoes. I was also amused at the timing and targeting of the press release, on a dead Sunday in the dead month of August. I soon learned that advanced copies had gone to Melikian and Thomas Hoving of Connoisseur, both highly respected and both, I assumed, honored to get this exciting news before anyone else. Each might otherwise have dug for dirt, but instead, both bought fully into the spin of the Houston press release claiming this purchase-restoration-repatriation scheme was a noble act of salvation. Everything, I thought, was set up to achieve the desired outcome. And I assumed that Dominique knew that Souren Melikian and Yanni Petsopoulos were friends.

  Did I want to be drawn into the story publicly, as a supposedly neutral authority? Of course. It was, after all, the International Herald Tribune, and I love to be quoted in the papers. So dutifully, I called Melikian back and played my role as a “well-known Byzantinist” in his celebratory front-page article of August 10th entitled “The Rescue of a Byzantine Masterpiece.” The foundation, I said, “did the right thing.” Then I went on to the point out the obvious, that “rescue and restoration is very important.” Yanni Petsopoulos emerges in the story as the wise and selfless godfather of this benevolent act of salvation, while Dominique de Menil hovers above it all as an ethereal, saintly force for good. This was more than Dominique could have dreamed.

  And it wasn’t over. Thomas Hoving, whose essay would appear under the “Ethics” banner in Connoisseur’s November issue, predicted that the scholars assembled at the Byzantine conference that month for the frescoes’ unveiling “will no doubt praise the Menil Foundation for its historic recovery of raped and stolen art”—a recovery whose “key ingredient is absolute honesty.” This was and remains the official version of the Lysi frescoes story. And it was repeated far and wide (NPR, The New York Times) in glowing terms when the frescoes were finally repatriated to Cyprus in the spring of 2012.

  I am one of the few who knows the rest of the story.

  THE LYSI FRESCO SAGA BEGAN for me, and for Dominique de Menil, more than five years earlier on Thursday, April, 28, 1983, the day after the opening of my icon exhibition at Dumbarton Oaks. Yanni Petsopoulos came to my office on the second floor of the DO mansion. He knocked, entered, closed the door behind him, and asked if I would hold in total confidence what he was about to show and tell me. I said “of course,” without thinking—something I learned never to do again. Yanni then produced three things for me to look at. One was a crude sketch of what I took to be a Byzantine church, perhaps of the 13th or 14th century, set on what appeared to be a rock ledge, with a series of saints beneath arches carved in low relief against the cleft in the hillside to the left. The church seemed plausibly Byzantine but those relief figures did not; they were Romanesque in style, not Byzantine. Yanni told me that this church had been discovered accidently by workmen bulldozing the dirt from a hillside to build a youth hostel in the area of Binbirkilise in southeastern Turkey.

  The idea of a church being dug up in a hillside of dirt seemed to me even stranger than those carved figures. But before I could process this information and respond, Yanni showed me two black and white photographs of Byzantine frescoes. One photo showed the apse of a church with the Virgin Mary flanked by two Archangels and the other the dome of a church with a large and powerful bust-length portrait of Christ surrounded by many small angels. This, he told me, was what the inside of that church-in-the-dirt looked like. And he drew my attention to the many “cut lines” on the two fresco photographs—the idea being that these frescoes had been (or were about to be) cut up. Implausible all around, I thought, but I didn’t sense that Yanni was there to convince me of the veracity of the church in the Turkish hillside story, but rather to get me to do something.

  Those lines, Yanni said, indicated the intention of the present “owner” to sell the frescoes in many small pieces to collectors across the globe. At that point, I envisioned two things: a shadowy figure with a rotary saw, and an apartment somewhere in Geneva or London with a single Byzantine fresco of an angel on the wall. Yanni said his mission was to save the frescoes. The sale of the entire ensemble, he assured me, would not be difficult nor would there be legal issues, since no one in governmental authority in Turkey was aware of this find and no one could ever know the history of the church, since, in effect, there was no history. There would only be a hole in the ground in a remote place, which soon would be covered over with a youth hostel.

  So, what did this have to do with me? The answer was simple: Yanni could get to the person who now possessed these frescoes, who, I had to assume, was a Turkish construction boss of some sort or a developer (if his story were true). He said that he was confident that for $600,000 he could “rescue” the frescoes (no mention of the church) and get them to a safe place to be reassembled, so that scholars could study them and the public enjoy them. Whether he asked me about Dumbarton Oaks taking on such a rescue action or not, I do not now remember, but I do recall saying immediately that DO could not get near these frescoes, given that no matter what the circumstances of discovery, this was a real church with real frescoes in a real place, and no public institution could get involved as the beneficiary of its recent desecration. The story would inevitably come out.

  Even then I had a strong suspicion that Cyprus and not Turkey was where these frescoes had been, or perhaps still were. (What I thought at the time, and what would prove to be true, was that the youth hostel did not exist. Instead, the frescoes had been plundered from northern Cyprus after the 1974 Turkish invasion.) It was obvious to me that Yanni’s rescue plan was a combination of public spiritedness (after all, he is Greek and a passionate connoisseur of all things Byzantine) and a dealer’s self interest, since he would stand to make a lot of money brokering the rescue. But what worked so neatly for Petsopoulos seemed to me a practical and ethical hornet’s nest for any institutional buyer.

  After I told him no, that Dumbarton Oaks couldn’t get near these frescoes, hostel or no hostel, it became pretty clear that he had another buyer in mind in the first place, namely Dominique de Menil. He had already sold Dominique an important Russian icon, and he knew that I had worked for her in the past. Yanni was probably also aware that I was the go-between for her purchase four years earlier of about two hundred small Byzantine bronzes from George Zacos, the legendary Greek dealer from Istanbul, for more than $200,000. Would Dominique de Menil step in and save these orphaned frescoes? My answer was the same: The Menil Foundation was soon to become a public museum with all the ethical and legal constraints that entails, and so it could never be part of a transaction to buy a Byzantine church interior, no matter how lofty the motive.

  The conversation concluded, secrecy was reaffirmed, and Yanni left my office. End of story I thought.

  TWO MONTHS LATER, I AND my family—Elana, Nicole, age 7, and Sonia, almost 3 years old—had just arrived at the Bemidji Regional Airport on Mesaba (Ojibwa for “Soaring Eagle”) Airlines by way of a connection at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. It was a beautiful, clear evening in the fourth week in June when way up there in northern Minnesota, sunlight lingers until well after 10:00 p.m. All we could see from the windows of the fifteen-seat Beechcraft turboprop as it landed were pine trees. We had just arrived in that tiny bit of America that is neither east nor west of the Mississippi, but rather north of the Mississippi. Its headwaters, about twenty miles south and a bit west of Bemidji, are so shallow and narrow that tourists can skip across them on a few rocks.

  We usually rented a car and drove the five hours from the Twin Cities to Fosston, my hometown. The urgency was a Vikan family reunion that was bringing the five Vikan children and their children together, seventeen of us in all, on the occasion of Fosston’s centennial celebration. This is why my father, along with most of the men in town,
had grown a beard, as the town’s founders wore beards.

  My father picked us up at the Bemidji airport. Almost immediately he presented me with a pink telephone message he had received at The Towns office that afternoon. I sensed he was proud of that message as a sign that his son was now an important person, since the call had come from someone in Paris. The Paris caller turned out to be Walter Hopps, whom Dominique de Menil had recently appointed to be the director of her planned museum in Houston. I had never met Walter, so I wondered how he got my father’s phone number and, more than that, why he was in such a hurry to get in touch from Paris. But what really puzzled me was Walter’s message: “Call after midnight, Paris time.” I didn’t think that was good.

  So I called Walter Hopps in Paris the next day, just after 5:00 p.m. Minnesota time, and sensing that something big might be afoot, I had pen and paper at hand, as I almost never did. Walter was waiting for my call, and it was immediately obvious that he was very angry. (Only later did I discover that anger was one of Walter’s main communication tools.) He was speaking from Dominique de Menil’s Paris apartment, and it was clear that this after-midnight appointment was chosen so that Walter would not be overheard. It seems he and Dominique had very recently been to Munich with Yanni Petsopoulos to see someone whom he identified only as a “Turk,” who was selling those same frescoes that Yanni had shown me in secrecy in my Dumbarton Oaks office two months earlier. The frescos were cut up and dirty, but otherwise in good shape, Walter said.