Alexander Malios

Alexander Malios bought his first Cypriot antiquity in 2016, a Cypro-Archaic jug, and decided to collect only Cypriot material¹. The jug is number 151 in the catalogue of the collection that bears his name¹.

Dresden, Cyprus and Leipzig

The collection's own short biography, published in a 2018 brochure, says he was born in Dresden in 1962 to a Cypriot father and a German mother². The German National Library's authority record agrees on Dresden but gives no year, and describes him as an entrepreneur, honorary consul and art collector³. According to the brochure, the family moved to Cyprus in 1972 and lived in the Limassol district, and he left in 1986 after military service². He later worked in real estate in Leipzig, and in 2008 he and his wife Birgit were among the founders of the Leipziger Kinderstiftung². The same brochure states that the family had a state-approved private collection of antiquities in Cyprus in the 1970s; what it contained and what became of it is not recorded².

The authority record lists a second collecting field alongside Cypriot antiquities, the Dresden School of painting³. His office as honorary consul is given in the same record, with no date of appointment³.

The collection and AMRICHA

Alexander Gatzsche, who writes as a member of the collection's staff, states that every piece in the collection has a long collection history and that lists of the objects with photographs are sent regularly to the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus¹. The collection is looked after by AMRICHA, a non-profit company in Leipzig that carries out research on the objects and their provenance^1,2. Its aims were set out in a 2018 brochure, Cyprus in Leipzig: Presentation - Ideas - Conception². Gatzsche's chapter on provenance research appears in the first volume of the catalogue, Alexander Malios Collection, Volume 1: Cypriot Antiquities, edited by Elena Poyiadji-Richter and published by AMRICHA in 2023¹.

In 2018 the institute's research traced a skyphos in the collection to the collection of Christakis Hadjiprodromou. According to Gatzsche, that collection was looted during the Turkish invasion of 1974, the Department of Antiquities and the Cypriot Embassy in Berlin were informed, and AMRICHA stated that it would then officially repatriate the piece¹. The published account gives the intention and does not report the return itself.