Alexis Drakopoulos

In 2023 Alexis Drakopoulos found a small Early Bronze Age Cypriot bowl offered for sale online and bought it. Until then he had known such objects only from museum cases and photographs¹. Three years later the collection that grew from that bowl numbered 133 catalogued objects, from Neolithic potsherds to Hellenistic vessels, each published with a dated list of its earlier owners⁴. He bought the bowl in the year he founded ancientcyprus.com, a free website on the archaeology and history of ancient Cyprus¹.

From Grenoble to Edinburgh

He was born in Germany in 1995 to a Greek-German father and a Cypriot mother¹. When he was three the family moved to Grenoble, where his father, a physicist with a love of archaeology and museums, took him on frequent museum visits; the summers were spent in Cyprus¹. At ten he moved with his family to England, near Oxford and its Ashmolean Museum, and at fifteen to Cyprus¹. He read mathematics and physics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and took a master's degree in computational applied mathematics at the University of Edinburgh¹. He then worked for technology start-ups in London before joining a major bank as a machine learning engineer, designing platforms and models, much of the work aimed at preventing financial crime¹.

ancientcyprus.com

He has written that the literature on ancient Cyprus he met as an adult reader was scattered, often out of print and costly, and tended to treat the island as an annex to its larger neighbours, and that this is why he founded ancientcyprus.com in 2023¹. His own estimate puts the number of Cypriot antiquities now held outside the island at between 83,000 and 165,000¹. In 2024, the first full year, the site published almost fifty articles². That year he photographed the Cypriot collections of the British Museum, of the museums at Kourion, Limassol, Larnaca and Nicosia and of the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, some 1,500 photographs in all, and visited the collector David Johnson in London². He also began making photogrammetric 3D models of objects from more than 6,000 photographs².

In 2025 he added an encyclopaedic compendium to the site and gave a 90-minute guided tour of the Limassol Archaeological Museum³. The site carries no advertising, and in 2024 and 2025 he paid for all of the work himself, without sponsors or donations^2,3.

Building the collection

He has described the collection as a by-product of the website and as a way of keeping documented and cared for those objects that cannot be returned to Cyprus³. He states that each piece he considers is checked against databases of stolen objects, that every purchase is reported to the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus before and after it is made, and that he keeps to the 1970 UNESCO Convention³.

Until 2025 he bought single pieces, from galleries and salerooms in Britain, France, Austria and the United States⁴. In 2023 Helios Gallery in London sold him a Bichrome amphora reported to come from the collection of Leto Severis and Costakis Severis in Cyprus⁴. More than twenty objects followed in 2024². Among them were a group of Iron Age jugs from the collection of Alfred Boucher in France, sold by his descendants, three White Painted plates sold at Hindman in Chicago, and an Archaic limestone head from the Paris collection of Victor Emile Gabriel Chevallier and Marguerite Jeanne Verel, bought at Aponem on 12 December 2024⁴.

The largest purchase came in 2025. He bought nearly the whole of a collection formed in Cyprus between 1965 and 1969 by an employee of the United Nations, 91 objects in all, together with the three export licences that covered it and photographs of the objects taken in 1969³. Catalogued as the Goodman Collection, it supplied most of the pieces he now owns⁴. One of its amphorae had been sold by the Cyprus Museum itself, under the sales number S.R. 3477/65, and left the island under export licence in 1969⁴.

Other pieces bought in 2025 came with longer histories. At TEFAF Maastricht he bought from Charles Ede Ltd a Bichrome IV jug painted with a striding bird³. Alessandro Palma di Cesnola had dug it up in Cyprus between 1876 and 1879. It was sold with the Lawrence-Cesnola Collection at Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge in London on 1 June 1883, belonged from that year to Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, who showed it in his museum at Farnham, and left his family at Sotheby's in 1975^4,6. A Bichrome IV amphora with a frieze of lotus flowers, first sold at Sotheby's in London on 11 November 1926, had been shown by ArtAncient at Frieze Masters in late 2024; he bought it early in 2025 and had it conserved in London^3,4. A large Bichrome plate from Salamis, sold by the estate of James Alfred Brew at Bonhams in 2009, reached him through TimeLine Auctions in March 2025, and a mould-made figure of the Achna type came from the Swedish collection of Sten Törnblom⁴.

Two more of Brew's pieces followed. In 1972 Brew had lent the Ashmolean Museum two Red Polished plank figures, one with two necks and one with three, and they stood in its Cyprus gallery for fifty-three years. When the loan closed on 30 September 2025 they passed to the Drakopoulos Collection^5,7. The oldest material in the collection is a set of five Neolithic sherds from the collection of Judge G. C. Griffith-Williams of Nicosia, mounted in a wooden Droste chocolate box with a handwritten label reading "Neolithic. Painted and combed ware. c. 3500 BC."⁴.

By 2026 the collection held 133 catalogued objects. Fifty-nine are Cypro-Archaic and thirty-three Early Bronze Age, and jugs are the largest class⁴. Each object is published with a description, museum comparisons and its provenance set out as dated custodies, and pieces from the collection are offered for loan to museums⁴.

Reporting and returns

He has written that the looting that followed the Turkish invasion of 1974 led him to report objects he identified as stolen and to help return them to Cyprus¹. In 2024 he reported a number of possibly looted objects to the Department of Antiquities². In 2025 he reported more than a hundred online sale listings that appeared suspicious, undocumented or possibly looted³. One case came from his own collection. A small Cypro-Archaic terracotta horse and rider entered it and was then found to have been stolen in the wake of the 1974 invasion, and it has been returned to Cyprus⁷.