Carl-Gustaf Styrenius

Carl-Gustaf Styrenius succeeded Olof Vessberg as director of the Medelhavsmuseet in Stockholm in 1971, and in 1982 the museum put the Swedish Cyprus Expedition's Ayia Irini statues on permanent display for the first time. The Cyprus Collections, about 12,000 objects and 5,000 boxes of sherds, had reached Stockholm in 1931 and were joined administratively with the Egyptian Museum in 1954^1,2. Styrenius wrote that when he took over in 1971 the problem of premises was still unsolved, and that he decided to follow the plan in the 1951 report of Sigurd Curman¹.

The plan for a new building lacked funds in the 1981 state budget, and the National Board of Public Building offered a former mortgage bank on Gustav Adolfs torg. The premises were inaugurated on 16 September 1982 in the presence of King Carl XVI Gustaf, Einar Gjerstad and Alfred Westholm. Several hundred Ayia Irini statues were permanently exhibited for the first time, with the Vouni head, the Vouni kore and the palace model¹.

In 1977 he co-authored Cypriote Antiquities in the Medelhavsmuseet (Medelhavsmuseet Memoir 2) with Vassos Karageorghis and Marie-Louise Winbladh⁵. Later researchers thanked him for access to the museum's Swedish-excavated metals for analysis⁹. In 1994 he wrote the history of the collections for The Swedish Cyprus Expedition: The Living Past¹. By 1997 he was described as the former director, when he wrote the Gjerstad entry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East⁸.