Cesnola's biographer Anna Marangou lectures on him and the Ohnefalsch-Richters on 2 November

Anna Marangou, an archaeologist and art historian who wrote a life of Luigi Palma di Cesnola, speaks at the University of Cyprus in Nicosia on Monday 2 November 2026 about Cesnola, Max Ohnefalsch-Richter and Magda Ohnefalsch-Richter. The talk, at 7.30pm Cyprus time, is part of the 66th public lecture series of the university's Archaeological Research Unit, whose programme lists it with a Greek title: «Ο Τσεσνόλα, ο Ρίχτερ και η Μάγδα: Δύο αρχαιοκάπηλοι και μια καταπληκτική γυναίκα». In English that reads "Cesnola, Richter and Magda: two antiquities plunderers and an amazing woman" (our translation); the judgement on the two men is the speaker's own.

Entry is free and the room is open to all; viewers online need to register first on the Zoom page that serves the whole series. The rest of the term's talks, to 12 December, are listed separately.

Three lives in the history of Cypriot archaeology

Luigi Palma di Cesnola (1832–1904) was the American consul at Larnaca from late 1865 to 1876. In those years he took about 35,000 objects out of Cyprus under Ottoman permits, sold most of them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and became its first director. He dug openly and sold to a public museum, but he also emptied tombs by the thousand with almost no record, ignored a ruling against export in 1871 and put statues together from parts that did not belong (his digging and his sales).

Max Ohnefalsch-Richter (1850–1917) came to Cyprus in 1878 as a newspaper correspondent and from 1880 to the mid-1890s excavated sanctuaries and cemeteries for the British administration, the British Museum, the Cyprus Museum, the Berlin museums and private patrons. Almost all of it was done under permit, and the finds were divided under the Ottoman regulation of 1874, so his share left the island lawfully; he also bought and resold antiquities, and his field methods were poor even for his time (his part in the trade).

Magda Ohnefalsch-Richter (1873–1922) married Max in 1894 and that year was appointed official assistant on his dig at Idalion, where he credited her skill and energy for the speed of the work. The couple planned, and partly made, a photographic record of the whole Cyprus Museum collection, and in 1913 she published Griechische Sitten und Gebräuche auf Cypern in Berlin, on Greek customs in Cyprus, illustrated with her own photographs. Its plate 64 reproduces a large group photograph of the 1894 Idalion excavation, one of the few pictures of that dig to survive. The scholars Stylianou-Lambert and Bounia think Magda was probably the main force behind the couple's ethnographic collection, now in folk museums in Berlin and Vienna.

The speaker's work on them

Marangou has published on Cesnola and on Magda before. In 1994 she edited the Greek translation of Magda's 1913 book, Ελληνικά Ήθη και Έθιμα στην Κύπρο, issued in Nicosia by the Popular Bank of Cyprus, and in January 2000 the bank's Cultural Centre published her The Consul Luigi Palma di Cesnola 1832-1904, Life and Deeds, timed to the opening of the Cypriot galleries at the Metropolitan Museum. In his foreword Vassos Karageorghis notes that she used archives earlier biographers had not seen, among them Cesnola's reports to the State Department and his letters to Hiram Hitchcock.