Christos Grigoriou

At Bamboula, near Kourion, John Franklin Daniel found Tomb 17 full of disturbed fill and proposed to abandon it; the foreman, Christos Grigoriou, insisted that the clearing go on, and it produced two pairs of gold calf's-head earrings². Jack L. Benson identifies the tomb with Tombs 53 and 102 of the British Museum's excavation of 1895².

Grigoriou's name first appears in the preface to the first volume of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition's publication, which lists "Messrs. Christos Grigoriou, Jorkis Andrea, and Simeon Stavrou" as trained workmen of the expedition, which worked in Cyprus from 1927 to 1931¹. He later served the University of Pennsylvania's Kourion expedition as foreman. Benson calls him Daniel's foreman at the Kaloriziki necropolis, where he reported wall remains found during the excavation³. George H. McFadden thanked him for his help in the field at the Ayios Ermoyenis necropolis and in the workrooms afterwards, "where his patience and skill saved many antiquities which seemed beyond repair"⁴. John Howard Young and S. H. Young credited him with the long work of joining and mending the Kourion terracotta figurines⁵.

Terence Mitford describes him as chief foreman of the expedition and, by the time of his volume of Kourion inscriptions, custodian of the museum at Episkopi⁶. He had himself excavated a tomb at Mersinouthkia, an outlier of the Kaloriziki cemetery, which yielded an inscribed Plain White jug; the inscription was noticed when the vessel was cleaned, and the jug was later separated from its tomb group⁶. He also told Mitford that a mortar rim with a stamped inscription had been picked up near Episkopi village in the winter of 1960-61⁶. His dates of birth and death are not recorded.