This Week in Cypriot Archaeology: 27 April–3 May 2026

This week the National Guard towed Kyrenia II, the full-size sailing copy of the Kyrenia ship, and a documentary theatre piece built from the records of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition was presented in Stockholm.

Map of Cyprus

This week's stories

• Events
• Museums
• Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

N

50 km

Sites on this map

1. 1Kyrenia
2. 2Ayia Irini

Events

On 27 April the National Guard towed Kyrenia II on what it called a symbolic voyage, with its fast boat Kyrenia I as escort. The Guard described the tow as a way of showing the island's naval tradition, and the outing was linked to Cyprus's presidency of the Council of the European Union.

Kyrenia II reproduces the merchant ship that sank off Kyrenia around 300 BCE, excavated in 1968–1969 by an international team under Michael Katzev, with the University of Pennsylvania Museum and Oberlin College among its sponsors. The replica was built between 1982 and 1985 from the evidence of the hull, and in 1986 it sailed from Piraeus to Paphos, about 600 nautical miles in 25 days, under the command of Glafkos Cariolou, son of the diver who found the wreck. Its usual home is the Thalassa Municipal Museum at Ayia Napa. The ancient hull itself remains in Kyrenia Castle, in the occupied north.

Museums

"Encounters", a documentary theatre production drawn from the texts, finds and photographs of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition of 1927–31, was staged on 20 and 21 April at the Medelhavsmuseet, Stockholm's Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities, the Cypriot government announced on 27 April. Its subject is the people of the expedition, Cypriot and Swedish, from the years before the digging began to its aftermath. It came out of a project coordinated by Dr Ellada Evangelou and Dr Despo Pasia with the Department of Antiquities, as part of the presidency's cultural programme and with support from the Cypriot embassy in Sweden.

The expedition, led by Einar Gjerstad, shipped its share of the finds to Stockholm in 1931: about 12,000 objects and 5,000 boxes of sherds. They include half of the terracotta figures from the sanctuary of Ayia Irini, more than 900 of which are shown together in a single case; the other half is in the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia. The project scheduled its next event there for 11 May, a workshop with artists from Cyprus and abroad titled "Artistic Practices in Colonial Museum and Archival Collections: Retellings and Reframings".