Former antiquities director Sophocles Hadjisavvas lectures in London on Cypriot olive oil

Sophocles Hadjisavvas, who once directed the Cypriot Department of Antiquities, will speak in north London on Sunday 29 November 2026 on the olive and its oil. The Olive Culture: From Antiquity to Industrialisation begins at 4pm at the Cypriot Community Centre in Wood Green. Entry is free and open to all, but places must be booked in advance through Eventbrite, linked from the organisers' listing.

Dr Hadjisavvas will follow oil production on the island from prehistory to the beginnings of industry, showing how presses and other olive-processing equipment changed and what oil meant for Cypriot society and its economy. The illustrated talk also covers the olive tree in Mediterranean art and custom.

The Cyprus High Commission in the UK, through its Cultural Section, organises the afternoon with the Union of Cypriots in England (EKA). It is dedicated to the late Dr Eleni Palazidou, a former president of EKA.

The speaker

Hadjisavvas joined the Department in 1973. From 1977 to 1982 he directed its first six seasons at the Tombs of the Kings in Nea Paphos; he also excavated in the Phoenician cemetery of Kition and led the Department's dig at the Late Bronze Age settlement of Alassa, ahead of the dam there. Olive oil entered his fieldwork in 1980, when road works between Nicosia and Limassol exposed an olive press at Mari-Kopetra and a rescue excavation followed. His Olive Oil Processing in Cyprus from the Bronze Age to the Byzantine Period appeared in 1992 as volume 99 of the Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology series (Paul Åströms Förlag).

The organisers add that he led the research, as scientific adviser, for the Hellenic Museum of the Olive and Olive Oil at Sparta. He curated From Ishtar to Aphrodite at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York and a Cyprus exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He studied in Sofia, Cambridge and Gothenburg, where he took his doctorate.

The rest of the season

The lecture is one of a series of autumn events on the archaeology and heritage of Cyprus run by the Cultural Section. The weekend before, Cyprus House hosts events with the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum, among them a lecture on Aphrodite on 21 November. The season ends with an educational event at the Ashmolean in Oxford on 13 December 2026.