Bostantus Beshes

Known only by a Turkish nickname meaning "five-five", Besbes was the dragoman and foreman of Luigi Palma di Cesnola at the American consulate in Larnaca. Cesnola's list of consular staff has a "Bostantus Beshes, Interpreter, nominated 1864", whom Anna Marangou thinks "probably" the same man². Olivier Masson reports that Georges Perrot called him a pure-blooded Greek, and says the nickname suits a lucky or cunning backgammon player; in 1996 Masson instead called him "un paysan très efficace"^5,6.

Cesnola's own book calls him "my confidential dragoman" and "one of the most faithful". When the Porte barred the American consul from exporting antiquities, Cesnola writes, Besbes pointed out that the order said nothing of the Russian consul, an office Cesnola also held; the Customs Director agreed, and Besbes sailed with the 360 cases to Port Said and Alexandria, returning after a month¹. Marangou dates the context to 1870-71, Masson to 1872^2,5. In 1869 Cesnola sent him with the diggers to Nea Paphos, where a mob attacked the party and he was told to prosecute the ringleaders before the Cadi¹.

David George Hogarth, writing from what Cesnola's former workers told him, held that the collection "was amassed by the labours of his dragoman Besh-besh, both by excavation and by purchase in the villages and in the bazaars"³. He wrote that villagers remembered Besbes digging at Drimu, which Cesnola does not mention, and that two Amargetti inscriptions published as coming from Paphos had been bought by Besbes, so that Cesnola "or his foreman" alone knew the provenance of many pieces in New York^3,4. Hogarth also thought the great depths Cesnola reported at Old Paphos and Amathus looked like inventions of Besbes³. No source records his dates or his fate.