Leventis Foundation screens Papapetrou's films; he recalls Karageorghis's return to Salamis

The A. G. Leventis Foundation is screening five films by the Cypriot documentary director Paschalis Papapetrou under the title "Cyprus: Stories of the Place". In an interview published on 1 November, Papapetrou, who has made more than 50 documentaries since returning from his studies in 1984, singled out his film on the excavations at Salamis, the east-coast city-kingdom in the area illegally occupied by Turkey since the 1974 invasion.

His late colleague Maro Theodosiadou proposed the subject after reading the Foundation's book on the excavations, and the Foundation paid for the film. Made 34 years after the invasion, it drew on the book and on people who had worked on the digs; shooting at the site took about eleven days. Vassos Karageorghis, who had excavated Salamis for the Department of Antiquities until 1974, was with them for two days, his first time in the occupied areas. In the film he remarks bitterly that he went to Salamis "and even paid for a ticket" (our translation).

A screening at the University of Cyprus drew a full hall, and in 2010 the film won an award at the 8th International Meeting of Archaeological Film of the Mediterranean Area in Athens. Papapetrou took Karageorghis back to Salamis while filming a later documentary on the Pentadaktylos range, with the geologist Giorgos Constantinou as its scientific adviser; there the guards at the site recognised Karageorghis and led the crew to the cistern that received the water of the Kefalovrysos spring at Kythrea.