University of Cyprus lectures to December take in Akrotiri, Cesnola and Bronze Age Pyla

The Archaeological Research Unit (ARU) of the University of Cyprus has six more Monday evening lectures in its 66th public series, from 26 October to 30 November 2026, followed by a lecture on Friday 11 December and a one-day workshop on Saturday 12 December. The Monday talks begin at 7.30pm Cyprus time in Amphitheatre E010 on the Old Academy campus in Nicosia and are streamed on Zoom at the same time. The unit's programme says they cost nothing to attend; watching online requires registration on the series Zoom page.

The remaining programme

26 October. Miltiadis Polidorou, a Research Lecturer at the ARU, speaks on "The Coast Beneath the Coast: Geoarchaeology, Heritage, and the Future of Akrotiri Peninsula".

2 November. Anna Marangou, an archaeologist and art historian, gives a talk announced in Greek, «Ο Τσεσνόλα, ο Ρίχτερ και η Μάγδα: Δύο αρχαιοκάπηλοι και μια καταπληκτική γυναίκα» ("Cesnola, Richter and Magda: two antiquities plunderers and an amazing woman", our translation). It has its own listing.

9 November. Joachim Bretschneider of the Department of Archaeology/Ancient Near East at Ghent University presents "From Harbour to Hilltop: Maritime Connectivity and Settlement Organisation at Late Bronze Age Pyla-Kokkinokremos/Cyprus".

16 November. Panayiotis Panayides of the Department of Antiquities lectures on "Beyond Destruction: Rethinking Urban Life in Seventh- and Eighth-Century Cyprus".

23 November. Raphael Laoutaris, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the ARU, speaks on "Silent Connectivities: Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean during the second half of the 3rd millennium BCE".

30 November. Eftychia Mylona, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie/Onesilos co-fund postdoctoral researcher in the university's departments of History and Archaeology and of Social and Political Sciences, closes the Monday series with a modern-history talk in Greek, «Οι Κύπριοι της Αιγύπτου στην Εποχή της Αποαποικιοποίησης: Διασπορά, Πολιτική Δράση και Εθνική Ταυτότητα» ("The Cypriots of Egypt in the age of decolonisation: diaspora, political action and national identity", our translation).

11 December (Friday, 7pm). Charlotte Roueché, Professor Emerita of Digital Hellenic Studies at King's College London, speaks on "Digital Byzantium: Joining the dots" in the Evi Sophianos hall of the Social Activities Building Complex on the New University Campus. The lecture is part of the first official presentation of MedCyprus, an internal research project of the university titled "A Digital Corpus of Painted Greek Inscriptions from Medieval Cyprus (10th–13th centuries AD)".

12 December (Saturday, 9am to 6pm). A workshop, "Early Ceramic Traditions in Cyprus and Beyond: Technology, Practice and Society from the Neolithic to the Chalcolithic", meets in room LRC 019 of the Stelios Ioannou Library/Learning Center on the New University Campus. Ourania Kouka and Sergios Menelaou organise it within NeoChalCY, a project on the beginnings of pottery making in Neolithic and Chalcolithic Cyprus. The workshop has its own listing.

The ARU says details and a Zoom link for the two December events will follow.

Where the talks meet the island's archaeology

Bretschneider is one of three directors, with Jan Driessen and Athanasia Kanta, of the excavations that resumed at Pyla-Kokkinokremos in 2014. The team has worked on a plateau settlement of the Late Cypriot IIC to IIIA phase, at the end of the Late Bronze Age, uncovering casemate rooms, shafts cut into the rock and metal workshops. Its report on the 2014 to 2019 campaigns appeared in the Aegis series (volume 24, Louvain) in 2023.

Panayides works on the end of the Roman cities of Cyprus. His Durham doctoral thesis of 2016 studied what became of statues in Late Antique Cyprus, and with Ine Jacobs he edited Cyprus in the Long Late Antiquity: History and Archaeology Between the Sixth and the Eighth Centuries (2023). His lecture covers the seventh and eighth centuries, the age of the Arab raids of 649 and 653/4 with which our Late Antique period closes, and the century after them.

Laoutaris's half-millennium covers the Early Bronze Age on the island, from the Philia phase through Early Cypriot I to III, c. 2500–1950 BCE: the time of Red Polished pottery and of villages of rectilinear houses. Roueché, for her part, wrote in 2001 on how the Department of Antiquities came to be founded in 1935.

The term began on 28 September with Artemis Karnava of the University of Crete on recent work in Cypriot epigraphy, and on 5 October Matthias Recke of Goethe University Frankfurt reported on the new excavations at the Apollo sanctuary of Tamassos-Frangissa near Tamassos, where the Department of Antiquities this year announced more than 20 statue bases. Recordings of earlier talks are on the ARU's YouTube channel.

Separately, the university's Department of History and Archaeology marks its 30th year with a reception for past and present students and staff on Wednesday 4 November at 7.30pm in the foyer and courtyard of the Ceremonial Hall on the Old Campus.