The Icon Hunter: A Refugee's Quest To Repatriate Her Stolen Cultural Heritage

As a child, Hadjitofi was forced to flee her home in the Mediterranean island of Cyprus as a result of the 1974 Turkish invasion. After taking refuge in the Netherlands, the author later became a businesswoman and Honorary Consul of Cyprus. This autobiography focuses on her diplomatic efforts to find and recover treasured religious icons, frescoes, and other valuable artworks which were looted from Orthodox churches after the attack. The author's negotiations with Dutch art dealer and informant Michel van Rijn eventually led to a 1997 police sting operation in Munich, where Turkish art thief Aydin Dikman was caught with a large cache of priceless stolen Cypriot artifacts. While Hadjitofi's deep dedication to recovering the cultural heritage of her homeland is admirable, this recounting is exhaustive in detail and includes long sections of re-created conversations. Hadjitofi fails to condense her labyrinthine discussions with van Rijn into a reasonably readable form, and the larger threads of her potentially compelling narrative are often obscured by a blizzard of extraneous information.