Letter from Schaeffer to Dikaios on publications and the resumption of excavationsClaude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

Handwritten: Nicosia Museum

Handwritten: illegible

Printed: DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF CULTURAL RELATIONS

Printed: General Secretariat of Excavations

19 August 1949

Mr P. Dikaios, Curator of the Museum of Nicosia.

Dear Friend,

On 10 June I acknowledged receipt of your two letters of 6 and 30 May concerning your latest work at Enkomi. My itinerant existence since then has prevented me from replying to your observations and interesting and I shall not undertake it since I shall have the pleasure of seeing you within 15 days and we shall have the opportunity to talk about all this.

I also thank you for your letter of 5 July sent to Oxford in which you agreed that I should lodge in the excavation house set up at Enkomi rather than in the monastery of St. Barnabas. I shall follow your advice.

Messrs Pironin and Forrer left this morning aboard the SS. Ionia for Limassol, where they are probably due to arrive on 27 August. Pironin is carrying the Enkomi treasure of 1947. To spare him difficulties at customs, I should be grateful if you would either alert them or send a representative of the antiquities service to receive them there. Pironin and Forrer will go directly to Nicosia to see you and votet their schedule: I asked Pironin to make me a good full-size drawing (development) of the Mycenaean hydria found by the Swedes and reproduced among others in your museum guide pl.7, fig. 1. I know of no detailed drawing of this so important vase, which I would like to discuss again, as it seems to me to have been dated too low by the Swedes. If, on the other hand, you possess or have seen in a publication a drawing of this vase of the quality and type of those reproduced by Stjövist in "Problems" fig. 19 to 21, a drawing I would like to use, it would be pointless for Pironin to make another. The 2nd task I have entrusted to him at your museum is to draw all the important vases and fragments from our 1946 and 1947 campaigns that have not yet been drawn, or that were restored in your workshops. As soon as these drawings are done, Pironin and Forrer must set off for Enkomi to attend at once to the setting up of our excavation house, which will need a minimum of furniture, tables, chairs, beds for the three of us, etc. I have placed funds at his disposal, but to reserve them as quickly as possible for the excavations proper, I should be grateful if you would advise Pironin on his purchases, possibly in Nicosia if they cannot be found in Famagusta, or of … continues