Film on what the 1974 invasion did to Cyprus's archaeology screens in Bristol and Swansea

SKAMMATA, the documentary that Danae Stylianou directed for the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, will be screened in Bristol on Sunday 15 November 2026 at 12:30 and in Swansea on Monday 16 November at 19:00, as the UK Cyprus Film Festival takes its programme to the west of England and to Wales. The Cultural Section of the Cyprus High Commission in the UK, which runs the festival, announced the dates on 21 October. The film draws on the Department's archives and on personal testimonies to follow Cypriot archaeology before and after the Turkish invasion of 1974, and what the war did to the island's sites and heritage.

Two screenings and a children's workshop

In Bristol the festival returns, again on a Sunday, to a Cypriot community audience that has supported its programme before. For the Swansea edition, across the Severn, the festival is working with Dr Ersin Hussein of Swansea University. Venues for the two screenings have not yet been announced. The Department has released a trailer for the film.

The day before, Saturday 14 November, the festival brings The Five Faces of Aphrodite, its new theatre workshop for young children, to Bristol's Greek diaspora school. Through theatre, storytelling, movement and games it introduces Cyprus and its myths.

The film and the speaker

SKAMMATA dates from 2024 and was on the programme of the festival's Brighton edition in April. It also comes to Cyprus House in London on 22 November, in a day of films and talks that also covers the excavation foreman Grigoris Antoniou. After the invasion, icons, frescoes, mosaics and antiquities were removed from churches, sites and museums in the occupied north, and some were later recovered abroad; the cases are set out in looting in the occupied north after 1974.

Hussein is an ancient historian who works on Cyprus, its material culture and identity. Her book Revaluing Roman Cyprus: Local Identity on an Island in Antiquity was published by Oxford University Press in 2021 [1], and her chapter in a 2025 volume deals with the Cypriot antiquities that reached Swansea.