Sorry to hear about your troubles, Kevin. Most of the regulations are in force in the attempt to stop the smuggling of rare items and are in principle similar to regulations in force in other countries, as Greece for example. This being said, some of the regulations regarding the control of postal shipments date from the time of the Cold War and are still in force. I think I have read somewhere that a law forbidding the shipment of books by mail is apparently still in force. The law originated from the time when the authorities tried "to prevent the imperialist agents from gathering information on the achievements of the socialist regime". The law applied to all kinds of books "as technical manuals and textbooks could be easily disguised as innocent novels". I wonder how the publishing houses that are nowadays shipping books abroad are coping with this old law. I think the regulations say that old objects could be part of the Patrimony and that you would need an expert opinion as to whether it is or it is not. Unfortunately there are many grey areas regarding how to decide whether an object is part of the National Patrimony or not. These are probably used as loopholes by smugglers, but they also hamper the activity of collectors. These things are often discussed by honest collectors who find their activity disrupted by bureaucratic details. The regulations exist Kevin, but as mentioned above they have many grey areas. See for example OMCC 2053/2002 regarding the classification of cultural items or HG 1420/2003 regarding the commercial activities with cultural items (I found these named on a collector forum, but you would probably have to ask a dealer about the most up-to-date rules - most likely against a fee ). In principle the regulations refer to rare items as archaeological artefacts. You may have noticed in the news that there have been several instances when Dacian or Ancient Greek archaeological sites were suspected to have been robbed and the items sent to dealers with numismatic galleries (who may have been involved themselves in the traffic). The problem with these however, is that it is the duty of the individual not of authorities to prove that the items are not part of the Patrimony. This leads to strange situations, as for example that of a collector receiving by mail a couple of old and tattered banknotes and who had to go to many banks until obtaining a certificate proving that those were not circulation money and that no regulations regarding the shipment of money by post or the import of currency have been crossed.