Two Cypriot antiquities returned by the Art of Eternity Gallery in New York to be repatriated to the island were handed over to the government at a ceremony at the Cyprus embassy in the USA, it announced on Wednesday.

In a post on X, the embassy said “a modest ceremony” was held on Tuesday for the repatriation of a Cypro-Archaic I (600 BC) quadriga chariot and a Cypro-Geometric/Archaic (750 BC) flask.

Those at the ceremony included representatives of the FBI International Operations Division, the Justice Department Office of International Affairs and the State Department Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs.

Ambassador Evangelos Savva said he had “expressed our gratitude for the voluntary return of the antiquities by the Art of Eternity Gallery of New York”, thanking owner Howard Nowes and director Dara Mayers, both of whom were present.

He said that a long-standing and close cooperation with the justice department and the FBI in the prevention of illicit trafficking of antiquities and the promotion of cultural preservation had manifested itself once again in the retrieval of these two precious artifacts.

FBI Section Chief David Lewis said the occasion “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, 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 at the time that “lately there has been a growing trend of returning antiquities.”