Ancient CyprusAncient Cyprus

Series·Swedish Cyprus Expedition

The expedition: people, houses and daily life

205 field photographs · 1927–31

Sites: Kyrenia, Pyrgos, Limassol, Kalopsidha, Kolossi, Kourion

This series holds 205 photographs of the expedition's members, their families and helpers, and the houses they lived in between 1927 and 1931. The four members were Einar Gjerstad, the director, the archaeologists Erik Sjöqvist and Alfred Westholm, and the architect John Lindros, who travelled between the sites to do the drawing and photographic recording. Vivi Gjerstad and the Gjerstads' children Martin and Stefan appear often, as do Rosa Lindros and Toulis Souidos, the "Tooulis Svidos, Nicosia" whom the expedition's first volume thanks as its "Jack-of-all-trades" and a skilled mender of pottery and sculpture.

Read more

Many photographs were taken at the expedition's house at 11 Gladstone Road in Nicosia, which the captions call the Swedish Institute: its courtyard in snow, rooms with shelves of pottery, room 4 labelled "Guldrummet" (the gold room), Westholm mending pots, and Gjerstad sending "the gold box" to Sweden. Others show days on the terrace of the expedition's house at Machairas, swimming at Kyrenia, tents in the field at Oura, lunch at Skarinou, and the expedition's Volvo outside a café at Pyrgos.

The finds were divided between the Cyprus Museum and Sweden in the autumn of 1930, and the members left in March 1931. See the people pages for Einar Gjerstad, Erik Sjöqvist, Alfred Westholm and John Lindros.

Sources

  • Gjerstad, E., Lindros, J., Sjöqvist, E. and Westholm, A. 1934. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition: Finds and Results of the Excavations in Cyprus 1927–1931, vol. I. Stockholm, pp. xix–xx.
  • Göransson, K. 2012. 'The Swedish Cyprus Expedition, the Cyprus collections in Stockholm and the Swedish excavations after the SCE'. Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes 42, pp. 399–400.
  • Göransson, K. 2013. 'The field records of J.R. Stewart's excavations at Vounous: archival material at the Medelhavsmuseet'. In A. B. Knapp, J. M. Webb and A. McCarthy (eds), J.R.B. Stewart: An Archaeological Legacy (Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology 139). Uppsala, pp. 195–200.
  • Karageorghis, V. et al. 2003. The Cyprus Collections in the Medelhavsmuseet. Nicosia, p. 24.

Photographs: Swedish Cyprus Expedition, Medelhavsmuseet, Stockholm (CC0)

All series of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition