Catalogue to accompany a new Kykkos gallery for David Johnson's donated Cypriot antiquities

A catalogue of the Cypriot antiquities that the British collector David Johnson is giving to Cyprus is due from Paul Holberton Publishing in London. The David Johnson Collection of Cypriot Antiquities at Kykkos Monastery Museum, written by Johnson, accompanies the opening of a new gallery built for the collection at the museum of Kykkos Monastery, in the Troodos mountains. The publisher lists it as forthcoming in early 2027: a 288-page paperback, 280 × 240 mm, with 270 illustrations, at £40 (ISBN 978-1-917976-01-5), distributed worldwide by Yale University Press.

What the collection holds

According to the publisher, the objects cover some 2,500 years, from the Middle Chalcolithic to about 480 BC, when the Classical era begins. Pottery makes up most of it, alongside bronze and stone objects and a few early coins. Its main strength is the Early and Middle Bronze Age, the centuries of regional pottery styles and of the flat, stylised human plank figures. Limestone sculpture of the Classical and Hellenistic periods falls outside it.

The book gives every object an entry and a photograph, and the publisher presents it as the permanent record of the collection. The publisher also states that most of the pieces come from tombs and were probably removed in illicit digging, as much Cypriot material on the market was.

The road to Kykkos

Johnson, who writes on his website that he began collecting in early 2013, had offered the Cypriot pieces to the island by 2018. In a statement issued through the Press and Information Office on 28 December 2018, the Department of Antiquities said it had accepted his offer of a possible donation to the Cyprus Museum and had repeated that acceptance to him on 13 December 2018. According to the Department, his final decision had come to depend on its approving purchases of Cypriot antiquities from sources he did not disclose, dealings in which it said it could not take part; the repatriation of such objects and the choice of where to show them, it added, rested with the Department alone.

Johnson writes that an agreement to pass the collection to Kykkos through Walk of Truth, the non-governmental organisation of Tasoula Hadjitofi, was signed on 23 September 2019, and that it later had to be rewritten after the pandemic held up the first shipment.

According to the publisher, the Hadjitofi Cultural Heritage Protection Foundation is now the channel for a formal gift of the collection to the Republic of Cyprus, and the Kykkos Monastery Museum has committed to showing all of it. On his website Johnson writes that half of the Cypriot objects have been given to the foundation, a UK charity, with the rest to follow.