Maria Iacovou to speak on Cypriot archaeologists at a free GACUK 40th anniversary evening in London

The Greek Archaeological Committee UK (GACUK), a body that pays for Greek and Cypriot students without the means to fund themselves to take postgraduate degrees in Hellenic archaeology at British universities, turns 40 this year. It will celebrate with an evening at Cyprus House in London on Wednesday 2 December 2026, which the Cultural Section of the Cyprus High Commission lists among its events. Doors open at 6:30pm and the programme starts at 7pm. Entry is free, with tickets booked through the High Commission on Eventbrite.

The Cyprus talk

The Cyprus item on the programme is a presentation by Maria Iacovou, who holds an emerita chair in prehistoric and protohistoric archaeology at the University of Cyprus, titled "From the University of Cyprus to UK Universities and Back: GACUK's Cypriot Scholars Today". Its subject is where the Cypriot graduates the committee has supported are working now, along the route the title traces, from the island's university to Britain and back again. Since 2006 Iacovou has directed the university's project at Palaepaphos, in the village of Kouklia.

One of those careers runs through her own fieldwork. Artemis Georgiou took her doctorate at Oxford, and in 2015 she contributed to AEGIS, a volume of essays offered to Matti Egon by the committee's scholars. Her chapter there reads the urban plan of Late Bronze Age Palaepaphos, and she wrote it as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the university's Archaeological Research Unit in Nicosia [1, p. 45].

The rest of the programme

The committee says it has funded more than 80 graduate archaeologists since it was founded. Matti Egon's daughter, Stamatia Comninos, a member of GACUK, opens with family memories. Irene S. Lemos, a classical archaeologist at Merton College, Oxford, who helped found the committee and is its academic advisor, looks back on the early years, and Judith Herrin, the King's College London Byzantinist, now emerita, recalls how Matti and Nicholas Egon started the scholarships.

Catherine Morgan of All Souls College, Oxford, a patron of the committee and its external assessor, speaks on seeing GACUK from inside and out. Two supervisors of its scholars also take part: Cyprian Broodbank, Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge and a patron, and Lucy Blue, Professor of Maritime Archaeology at Southampton. Former scholars now working in Britain and those holding awards today will each give a short account of their current research.