Alfred Westholm

Alfred Westholm dug the palace of Vouni, the theatre and the Cholades temples at Soli, and the Bamboula mound at Kition, and the Cypriots called him "Alfiros"^1,6. He was born in Falun on 22 June 1904 and died at Ramsberg on 7 June 1996².

The Swedish Cyprus Expedition reached the island in the autumn of 1927, financed by private donors and supported by Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf. Einar Gjerstad was its leader, Erik Sjöqvist and Westholm its field archaeologists, and John Lindros its architect. Gjerstad directed the whole. Sjöqvist or Westholm led the fieldwork, each with a separate team of Cypriot workers, so that two sites could be dug at once, and Lindros drew and photographed¹.

Westholm began in October 1927 with the theatre at Soli. In spring 1928 he opened the palace at Vouni and kept working there until autumn 1929; the foreman at Vouni was Lazaros^1,6. In February and March 1928 he excavated tombs at Milia, under a permit issued after the police had reported clandestine digging¹.

In the summer of 1929 he spent two weeks at Petra tou Limniti, which Göransson describes as yielding the first Neolithic remains in Cyprus. In September he made a small excavation at Ayios Phokas near Lefkoniko, which was never published; his notebook lists Archaic to Roman limestone sculpture from it, including a head of Pan. From October 1929 to April 1930 he examined the mound of Kition-Bamboula stratigraphically, with the aim of dating the Phoenician colonisation¹.

Kythrea, Mersinaki and the Cholades temples

In spring 1930 Westholm dug a Chalcolithic settlement of five round huts at Kythrea, and that summer a sanctuary of Apollo at Mersinaki, where a pit held sculpture¹. His last campaign ran from November 1930 to the end of February 1931 at the Cholades site at Soli, where he excavated six temples, labelled A to F. The expedition and the Cyprus Museum shared the cost¹. He published the results in The Temples of Soli (1936)⁸.

The collections in Stockholm

Sweden and Cyprus divided the finds by whole tomb group or deposit. Sweden received a representative series, about two thirds of nearly 18,000 finds. The roughly 2,000 terracottas from Ayia Irini were split between the two, and most of the gold stayed in Cyprus, with casts made for Stockholm¹. The Swedish share left Famagusta in March 1931. About 12,000 objects and 5,000 boxes of sherds were stored in the Oxenstiernska Malmgården in Stockholm, and in 1934 Westholm was put in charge of them. He held the post until 1945¹.

Parts of the first three volumes of the expedition's final report, The Swedish Cyprus Expedition: Finds and Results of the Excavations in Cyprus 1927-1931, carry his initials, A. W.⁴. In 1941 he arranged the exhibition Före Fidias, which showed pre-classical art, chiefly from Cyprus and Mycenaean Greece^1,9. With Olof Vessberg he wrote volume IV:3, The Hellenistic and Roman Periods in Cyprus (1956)¹¹. His letters to his parents from the expedition years were published in 2006, edited by Paul Åström¹⁰.

Westholm later became director of the Gothenburg Art Museum³.