Kassianidou, Reeve and Ulbrich to discuss Cypriot antiquities in UK museums in London on 7 December

Three specialists in Cypriot archaeology and its museum history will sit on a public panel at the High Commission of the Republic of Cyprus in London on Monday 7 December 2026, to talk about the Cypriot antiquities held in British collections. Cypriot Antiquities in the UK: Building Cultural Bridges begins at 18:30, with doors open from 18:15, at Cyprus House, 13 St James's Square. The Cultural Section of the High Commission organises the evening jointly with the Hellenic Institute of Royal Holloway, part of the University of London, and lists it on Eventbrite.

Entry is free and open to the public, but places are limited and must be booked in advance on Eventbrite, one registration for each person attending. A reception follows the discussion.

The speakers

Vasiliki Kassianidou is an archaeologist who was formerly the Republic of Cyprus's Deputy Minister of Culture. At the University of Cyprus she became professor in 2013 and directed the Archaeological Research Unit from 2015 to 2019; her fieldwork includes the excavation, with A. Bernard Knapp, of the copper-smelting slag heap at Politiko-Phorades from 1997 to 2000.

Anna Reeve, of the Institute of Classical Studies in London, works on Cypriot material in British museums. Her doctoral thesis at Leeds (2021) traced how the Leeds Cypriot collection was assembled between 1870 and 1947, and in 2025 she co-edited Empire and Excavation, a volume on archaeology in Cyprus under British rule. The routes by which Cypriot objects reached British museums are also the subject of her lecture for CAARI in Nicosia on 5 November.

Anja Ulbrich is the A.G. Leventis Curator of the Cypriot Collection at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. The post, supported by the A.G. Leventis Foundation, combines research on the collection with outreach to Cypriot communities across the United Kingdom. Ulbrich is also giving a lecture on Aphrodite at Cyprus House on 21 November.

Eleni Zimi, Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of the Peloponnese in Kalamata, chairs the discussion.

The collections in question

The organisers say the evening will move past the familiar arguments over antiquities and restitution. Their questions are how museum displays can show UK audiences the range of the island's ancient civilisation, how they can connect the Cypriot diaspora with it, and how such objects can open dialogue where heritage has become a political matter.

Ulbrich and Thomas Kiely rank the Ashmolean's Cypriot collection second in Britain, after the British Museum's: some 6,800 registered objects, more than 70 per cent of them securely provenanced. Oxford's holdings began late, with gold jewellery registered in 1873, and grew through gifts, exchanges and shares of excavated finds, among them about 1,200 provenanced objects from J. L. Myres's 1894 excavations for the Cyprus Exploration Fund. Smaller groups sit in regional museums, such as the Leeds collection that Reeve studied, which grew from the Cypriot antiquities that the British consul Thomas Backhouse Sandwith shipped to England for sale in 1870.