Unnumbered pageScan 2 of 4
Stamp: LE CASTEL BLANC / 14, RUE TURBOT / ST. GERMAIN-EN-LAYE
9 December 1969
Mr V. KARAGEORGHIS Director of Antiquities and Museums Nicosia Museum Island of Cyprus
Dear Colleague,
I hope you have returned in good health from your new great lecture tour, communications and meetings with your minister. I learned yesterday at the Academy of the interest aroused by your communication on Kition.
Given your absence at the time of my departure from Cyprus, and the visit that Mr Kazamias made in your company and that of his minister to Enkomi, I bade him farewell at his office in Nicosia on 17 November. On this occasion, he returned to the problem of accelerated exploration, of which he had spoken to us at the excavations at Enkomi-Alassia, on 11 November last, in your presence. He indeed wishes that within a few years the essential part of the great site be uncovered, to be presented to the public, well enclosed and properly maintained. I agree that this would constitute a major centre of interest and would allow the tourists who flock to Salamis and to the tombs royal to appreciate the importance of the high civilisation of Cyprus. During the interview, and after I had set out the scientific difficulties, technical and budgetary, of an exploration of this vast site in a few years, Mr Kazamias told me that your government could bear the costs of a larger labour force, but that your Department, given its numerous excavations and conservation works, could not take part in this undertaking on the scientific and technical level. I understand that, of course. On the other hand, I had to inform him that the French Archaeological Mission could not, in the immediate future, make a greater effort than that of these last years. It therefore seemed to me that the only solution able to answer his suggestion would be to seek it in a collaboration with one or more missions from abroad, or in the formation of an international mission associated with the French Archaeological Mission, working in parallel with it during the two excavation seasons compatible with the climate of the site, one in March-April, the other in September-December.
Mr Kazamias replied to me that the project of an international mission which " would share in the work of exploration of the French Expedition" correswould correspond to his own views. He asked me to study such a project, and to inform him subsequently of the possibilities.
Handwritten: \ ...
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