Costakis Severis

Costakis Severis gave his name to a private collection of Cypriot antiquities formed in Nicosia; what he bought himself is not recorded. He married Leto Severis, née Lymbouridou and born in 1916, in 1936. The collection's catalogue prints the recollection of their son, Demosthenis C. Severis, that the "real surprise" of the marriage was her husband's "enthusiasm and continuous encouragement" of her studies and of her plan to begin an antiquities collection¹. His father, Demosthenis Severis, was already buying locally, and Leto's collection started from his¹. The couple had two sons¹.

Vassos Karageorghis published pieces in the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique as the "Collection K. Severis" in 1973 and "Collection C. Severis" in 1975, and again in 1978, without saying which family member acquired them^2,3,4. He describes the collection as formed mainly from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, and as one of three large collections whose owners were asked to declare them to the Department of Antiquities in the last six months of 1973¹. Of the 288 catalogued pieces, S. A. Hardy wrote in 2014 that "all" were "probably looted during the civil war"; Hardy's analysis concerns the collection as a whole⁵.

Leto Severis stopped collecting in July 1974, when the family left the north as refugees, and about 600 pieces were looted¹. In 1999 the Costakis and Leto Severis Foundation published the first catalogue, and in late 2009 Demosthenis C. Severis placed the collection on long-term loan to the Leventis Municipal Museum in Nicosia¹.