Chris Phylactou

Most of the antiquities in the Phylactou Collection were gathered in Limassol by Heracles Skyrianides, the grandfather of Chris Phylactou, and reached Phylactou through his mother¹. His date of birth is not recorded.

Skyrianides inherited a house in Limassol around 1878 and let its ground floor to the first British Commissioner of Limassol. He began collecting through his contacts with British officials¹. When he died in 1944 the collection was divided among his three children. Phylactou's mother received the smallest share, and in Phylactou's own account it makes up most of the objects in the later catalogue¹. The Preface to that catalogue says he inherited the collection from his parents, while his Prologue says the share passed to him when he married; the father's part, if any, is not described¹.

The objects were displayed first in his parents' house in Nicosia and then in his own. Part of the collection went to a house at Bellapais, which he regards as lost in 1974¹. No inventory of what was kept there is given. After 1974 he lived overseas, where he bought a few Cypriot antiquities in open markets; the sellers and the objects are not named¹.

Vassos Karageorghis had already published five pieces from the "Collection Chr. Phylactou, Nicosie" in his annual report on archaeological discoveries in Cyprus for 1977. They were a Red Polished askos given as from Dhenia, a Red Polished jug, a Base Ring II composite bowl, a White Painted III wall bracket and a terracotta female figurine².

The Leventis loan

Karageorghis, whom Phylactou describes as a school friend, studied every object in the collection in the summer of 2009 at Phylactou's mansion at Platres¹. Phylactou then decided to lend it to the Leventis Municipal Museum in Nicosia on a long-term basis. His Prologue thanks Dino Leventi, Lady Hunt, the museum's curator Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel, the Mayor of Nicosia, Eleni Mavrou, and Tassos Leventis of the A. G. Leventis Foundation for their help with the decision¹.

The collection opened in a gallery of the museum's new Constantine Leventis Wing in January 2010. The A. G. Leventis Foundation published the catalogue, Cypriote Antiquities in the Phylactou Collection, in the same year, edited by Karageorghis with a Prologue by Phylactou¹. It is strongest in Red Polished III pottery of the Early and Middle Bronze Age, and almost none of it has a recorded find-spot¹.

Karageorghis used the Preface to the catalogue to defend the private collectors active between 1963 and 1974, and wrote that not all of them were scrupulous. He did not say this of Phylactou¹.