German and German-Speaking Archaeologists and Other Scholars in Cyprus (19th and Early 20th Centuries)

In this lecture, given in Greek, Yiannis Violaris of the Department of Antiquities surveys the German and German-speaking archaeologists, orientalists, philologists, geographers and journalists who visited or wrote about Cyprus during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until the First World War and British annexation in 1914 halted German archaeological activity on the island. Violaris sets their work within the geopolitical context of the Eastern Question and the removal of Cypriot antiquities to foreign museums.

Proceeding chronologically, the talk begins with the Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, who visited in 1808, described the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Palaepaphos and the acropolis of Amathus, and donated an inscribed base from Palaepaphos to the imperial collections in Vienna. Next is the Baltic German scholar Otto Friedrich von Richter, who toured Famagusta, Larnaca, Kition, Nicosia and Kythrea in 1816 and met Archbishop Kyprianos. Violaris then discusses Wilhelm Heinrich Christian Engel, who never visited Cyprus but published a two-volume monograph on its geography, history and classical sources in 1841.

A substantial section follows the 1845 tour of the German archaeologist Ludwig Ross, financed by Frederick William IV of Prussia. Ross recorded sites and local traditions across the island, acquired sculptures from Idalion and inscriptions from Kition for the Berlin Museum, noted the mounds at Salamis and the site of Ayia Irini, and documented the discovery and breaking up by villagers at Tamassos of the Chatsworth bronze Apollo, whose head reached the British Museum. Violaris connects Ross's calls for German colonies in Cyprus with wider German colonial ambitions.

The lecture next covers Julius Heinrich Petermann, who bought coins and inscriptions in 1852, and Karl Friederichs of the Berlin Museums, who purchased over two hundred objects in 1869 from Luigi Palma di Cesnola and Demetrios Pierides. After reviewing the 1878 visits of the Bavarian historian Franz von Löher and the Cologne newspaper correspondent Karl Schneider, Violaris turns to Max Ohnefalsch-Richter. Living on Cyprus from 1878, Ohnefalsch-Richter excavated at some fifty sites, supplying Berlin with hundreds of objects from Idalion and Tamassos before being fined in 1910 for attempting to export antiquities disguised as boxes of Turkish delight.

Violaris then examines the historical geographer Eugen Oberhummer, who visited in 1887 and 1891 and compiled a detailed study of the Near Eastern sources and physical geography of Cyprus, and notes the influence of German scholarship on early Cypriot historians such as Hieronymos Myriantheus. The lecture closes with the epigraphist Justus Siegismund, a pioneer in studying the Cypriot syllabary, who was killed in March 1876 by a falling stone in a built tomb at Amathus; Violaris recounts his funeral in Limassol and recites excerpts from a contemporary Cypriot folk poem lamenting his death.