Cypriot Antiquities in the Alexander Malios Collection

This book presentation introduces the first volume cataloguing 320 Cypriot antiquities from the Alexander Malios Collection in Leipzig, edited by Elena Poyiadji-Richter and dedicated to the memory of Vassos Karageorghis. After introductions by Athanasios Vionis and Poyiadji-Richter, collector Alexander Malios describes his childhood in Limassol near Amathus, the start of his collecting in Germany in 2016, and the founding of the Alexander Malios Research Institute for Cypriot Heritage and Archaeology (AMRICHA). He notes the institute's cooperation with the Department of Antiquities to identify objects looted after the Turkish invasion of 1974.

Alexander Gatzsche, keeper of the collection, outlines the institute's curation of roughly 1,200 Cypriot artefacts and its provenance research. Many pieces derive from nineteenth- and twentieth-century dispersals, including Metropolitan Museum of Art duplicates from Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the album of Alessandro Palma di Cesnola via the Pitt-Rivers collection, the Desmond Morris collection, and the dissolved museum of Takey Crist in Jacksonville, North Carolina, as well as smaller holdings bearing old Cypriot export permits and lead seals. Gatzsche highlights the 2018 identification in the market of an antiquity looted in 1974 from the Christakis Hadjiprodromou collection, reported to Cypriot authorities for repatriation. He also summarizes AMRICHA's support for a handbook of Cypriot ceramics directed by Sabine Rogge, excavations at Tamassos-Frangissa directed by Matthias Recke and Philipp Kobusch, and conservation and archaeometric research with Berlin's University of Applied Sciences.

Keynote speaker Gabriele Koiner reviews the history of Cypriot collections in Leipzig and surveys the catalogue entries by period, from Neolithic stone objects and Chalcolithic picrolite cruciform pendants to Bronze Age Red Polished, White Painted, Base Ring, and White Slip wares, alongside an oxhide ingot whose lead-isotope signature points to the Soloi region. Iron Age holdings include pictorial and floral-style pottery, terracotta warriors, horse-and-rider figurines, chariot groups, female musicians, and a bronze bird fragment with a Cypro-Syllabic inscription. Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman material encompasses limestone votive heads and statues from the Mesaoria, temple boys, coins of Kition, Salamis, and Palaepaphos, gold jewellery, stamped lamps by Faustus and Romanesis, and glass vessels. Poyiadji-Richter closes by thanking the fourteen contributing authors and presenting a copy to Clio Karageorghis.