Pylon exhibition in Limassol traces the Episkopi men J. Lawrence Angel measured in 1949

Pylon Art & Culture in Limassol is showing Tracing Angel's Men, an exhibition by the artist and researcher Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert about the Episkopi villagers whom the American physical anthropologist John Lawrence Angel studied in 1949. It opened on 10 October 2026 and runs until 19 December. The show is made up of four new artworks built on Angel's archive and on the memories of the men's families.

Episkopi, west of Limassol, was a mixed village in 1949, and its Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots went on living there together until 1974. Angel stayed in the village after Porphyrios Dikaios, then curator of the Cyprus Museum, invited him to the island. He worked on skeletons from the excavations nearby, and for his research on the population history of Cyprus he also measured living residents.

Finding the families

According to the gallery, many of the men in Angel's study also worked on the archaeological digs around Episkopi. His papers are now at the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, and Stylianou-Lambert used them to reconstruct the genealogies of the men in his study. The researcher Thalia Efthymiou then coordinated fieldwork in Episkopi and in several villages of the occupied north, which located descendants of both the Greek Cypriot and the Turkish Cypriot participants. The families shared photographs and stories of daily life, and the exhibition guide thanks the descendants of 57 men.

The curator, Alessandro Cazzola, argues in the guide that these men's names and contributions are largely absent from the official record, and he traces that absence to "colonial and class-based structures of knowledge".

Four works

Specimens shows foot-shaped butterflies pinned in specimen boxes, with two photographs of a girl holding them. Stylianou-Lambert generated the butterflies with artificial intelligence from Angel's records of each man's second toe, which he measured to test the Greek foot theory: the claim that a second toe longer than the big toe was characteristic of Greek populations. Forty colour slides, laid on a light table with magnifying glasses for visitors, document the steps from generating the images to pinning them.

Tracing Angel's Men: an expanded archive, the work that gives the show its name, is a 44-minute video. It sets Angel's Smithsonian photographs against the snapshots and recollections the descendants offered, and a file beside it holds the full set for visitors to page through.

Presence is about the measuring session itself, a part of anthropometric work that was seldom documented. Starting from Alphonse Bertillon's Identification anthropométrique / instructions signalétiques (1893), the artist used AI to stage the procedure as a sequence of images, viewed in two View-Masters. Side Stories (the TV was playing and the waves were breaking) ends the show with an edited version of the letters Dikaios and Angel wrote to each other, cut down to their private passages.

Angel at Episkopi in 1949

Angel was born in England in 1915 and started in classics at Harvard before moving into physical anthropology. He taught gross anatomy at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia for 19 years and in 1962 became curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History [2, p. 291].

In March and early May 1949 he examined the remains of 61 people from Late Bronze Age tombs 2 to 21 in the Bamboula cemetery, dug by the late J. F. Daniel, and the bones of eight adults and three children from Hellenistic tombs at Ayios Ermoyenis, excavated by George H. McFadden [1, p. 148]. Both cemeteries belonged to the University of Pennsylvania's long campaign at Kourion. His full report on the Bamboula skeletons came out only in 1972, as Appendix B of J. L. Benson's volume on the cemetery [1].

A project about the Cyprus Museum

Tracing Angel's Men belongs to An Archaeological Museum at the Threshold, Cazzola's curatorial project on the Nicosia museum in the years before its move to a new building. Cazzola's guide ranks Dikaios among the leading figures of Cypriot archaeology and points to how much of his work was done with specialists from abroad, Angel among them.

Stylianou-Lambert is a professor in the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology; her awards include a Smithsonian Fellowship in Museum Practice and a Fulbright Fellowship. Eleonora Antoniadou designed the exhibition, Errikos Pantelides made the metal structures and Nour Moustafa did the graphic design. The guide also thanks the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian, the Department of Antiquities and Kourion Municipality.

The gallery has published the exhibition guide in English and Greek.