Anastasios G. Leventis

Anastasios G. Leventis was born at Lemythou in 1902 and left Cyprus at 16. He became General Manager of a firm in the Gold Coast at 26 and had his own business from 1937. He sat on the Gold Coast Legislative Council, advised Nkrumah's government, and served as Cyprus's ambassador to UNESCO for the last twelve years of his life¹.

Vassos Karageorghis, then Director of Antiquities, met him in his Paris office in 1965 to ask for money for the monastery of Apsinthiotissa. Leventis had already given in 1963 and 1964, and he handed over a cheque for £3,000¹. In 1973 the Cyprus Museum acquired a considerable number of objects that had circulated on the market, through a donation from the ambassador of Cyprus to UNESCO, given as "M. A. Leventis"². In 1978, ill in Athens, he supplied money, with a grant from the Cyprus Government, to buy a Late Bronze Age bronze wheeled stand that had been exported from the island and traced to a dealer near Frankfurt; the British Museum and the Louvre had refused it¹.

He died in 1978. The A. G. Leventis Foundation was created soon afterwards, and its Cypriot branch, the Foundation Anastasios G. Leventis, in 1980, with Constantinos Leventis as chairman¹. His brother Christodoulos Leventis, who died in January 1990 aged 84, supported the Foundation in its early years¹.