Two Cypriot antiquities were returned by the Art of Eternity Gallery in New York, for their repatriation, during a ceremony at the Embassy of the Republic of Cyprus in the United States.

According to a post on X by Cyprus’ Embassy in the US, “a modest ceremony” was held on Tuesday at the Embassy for the repatriation of two Cypriot antiquities, a Cypro-Archaic I (600 BC) quadriga chariot and a Cypro-Geometric/Archaic (750 B.C.) flask, with the participation of US officials from the FBI International Operations Division, the Justice Department Office of International Affairs and the State Department Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs.

Cyprus’ Ambassador Evangelos Savva, it said, “expressed our gratitude for the voluntary return of the antiquities by the Art of Eternity Gallery of New York and thanked in this regard its Owner / Director Howard Nowes and Director Dara Mayers, who were also present.”

“He similarly underlined our appreciation to the Justice Department and the FBI for our long-standing and close cooperation in the prevention of illicit trafficking of antiquities and the promotion of cultural preservation, which manifested itself once again in the retrieval of these two precious artifacts”, it adds. According to the Embassy, this was also echoed in the comments made by FBI Section Chief David Lewis.

The occasion, it said, “served to reinforce the importance” of the Cyprus-USA bilateral agreement “Imposition of Import Restrictions on Pre-Classical and Classical Archaeological Objects and Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Period Ecclesiastical and Ritual Ethnological Materials.”

Last December, the Deputy Minister of Culture, Vasiliki Kassianidou, had travelled to Los Angeles, for the repatriation of another 266 Cypriot antiquities that were illegally exported in the past decades, noting that “lately there has been a growing trend of returning antiquities.”