The Other Cesnola: The Arrest and Trial of Alessandro Palma di Cesnola for Illicit Excavation

Nicholas Stanley-Price reconstructs the arrest, detention, and trial of Alessandro Palma di Cesnola in October 1878, only months after the British administration took over Cyprus. Drawing on Foreign Office correspondence and the papers of the first High Commissioner, Sir Garnet Wolseley, the lecture examines how the new colonial authorities enforced the Ottoman antiquities regulation of 1874.

Alessandro had come to Cyprus in 1873 at the invitation of his elder brother, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, and returned in 1876 to collect and excavate on behalf of his London sponsor, Edwin Lawrence, focusing from late 1877 on the area of Salamis and Enkomi. In August 1878, following advice sent by Charles Newton of the British Museum to the Foreign Office, Wolseley issued a proclamation banning all excavations. Although the Chief Secretary, Colonel George Greaves, explicitly refused Alessandro a digging permit, villagers and the son of his landlord at Ormidhia reported in October that his agent Lazaros Filippi was still employing workmen at Enkomi and storing the finds locally.

After police seized the finds and detained him overnight in the Larnaca Konak, Wolseley initially intended to release Alessandro with the confiscation of the excavated antiquities. Encouraged by the visiting writer William Hepworth Dixon, however, Alessandro broke his promise to hand over the finds sealed by police at Ormidhia and sent a formal protest to the American consul in Beirut. Provoked by this challenge to British authority, Wolseley ordered a formal prosecution for clandestine digging under British rule before the Medjlis Daavi court in Larnaca, where the newly appointed Assistant Commissioner Claude Delaval Cobham acted as Italian interpreter.

The court found Alessandro guilty, confiscating the Enkomi finds and over 1,500 antiquities from the Ormidhia house, some of which eventually entered the Cyprus Museum, while the bulk of the Lawrence-Cesnola collection, already shipped to England, was later dispersed at auction between 1883 and 1892. Stanley-Price shows from US State Department records that Alessandro's claims to American citizenship and the title of vice-consul at Paphos were unfounded, and suggests that financial dependence on Lawrence, whose daughter Augusta he married six months after returning to London, drove him to defy the British ban.