Despina Pilides

In the archive of the Cyprus Museum, while she was researching the hill of Ayios Georgios in Nicosia, Despina Pilides found six diaries kept by George Jeffery between 1898 and 1935¹². She edited them, with his correspondence, as a two-volume work that the Department of Antiquities published in 2009^4,12. She also appears in print as Despo Pilides and as D. Pilides. She trained at University College London¹¹.

Two early papers deal with pottery. In 1991 she proposed a clearer classification for the Handmade Burnished Wares of the Late Bronze Age¹, and in 1992 she published a paper on the regional variation of Monochrome Ware in the Göteborg congress volume Acta Cypria².

Sanidha and St George's Hill

In 1991 she excavated at Sanidha with Ian A. Todd, Maria Hadjicosti and J. S. Smith. The four are named as the authors of the report on the 1991 season⁸. The report on the 1992 season appeared under the names of Todd and Pilides, with Hadjicosti⁹.

In Nicosia she directed four seasons of rescue excavation on St George's Hill, in summer 1996, in 1997, and in spring and autumn 1998. The work preceded the construction of the new House of Representatives^3,10. The hill had a literature before the excavation. Max Ohnefalsch-Richter and Luigi Palma di Cesnola had both reported finds there in the nineteenth century, and in a paper of 2001 she set those reports against what her own seasons had recovered³. The hill is one of the places proposed as the site of ancient Ledra³. In 2008 she published, with Jean-Pierre Olivier, a black glazed cup from the hill, in an article entitled "A Black Glazed Cup from the Hill of Agios Georgios, Lefkosia, Belonging to a 'Wanax'"⁶.

Editing and the history of the Department

Pilides is credited with a series of edited volumes. With Nikolas Papadimitriou she edited Ancient Cyprus: Cultures in Dialogue, the Department of Antiquities catalogue for an exhibition at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels, which ran from 31 October 2012 to 17 February 2013⁵. She contributed to it a short piece, "From treasure hunting to systematic excavation"¹⁵. With A. McCarthy she edited Protecting the Cultural Heritage of Cyprus: Joining Efforts in Preventing the Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Heritage (Nicosia, 2014)¹⁷. With Maria Mina she edited Four Decades of Hiatus in Archaeological Research in Cyprus: Towards Restoring the Balance (Vienna, 2017)¹⁶. She also edited the proceedings of the Enkomi workshop, in which Thomas Kiely published a paper entitled "Poachers turned gamekeepers?"¹⁸.

Two later chapters deal with the early history of antiquities in Cyprus. In 2018 she contributed a chapter on Ohnefalsch-Richter, the legal framework and the Cyprus Museum to the volume edited by Schmid and Horacek¹⁴. A chapter in a volume of 2025 treats the implementation of imperial policy on the antiquities of Cyprus from 1869 to 1935¹⁸.

Posts held

A caption in the CAARI newsletter of fall 2009 describes her as a Senior Archaeological Officer in the Department of Antiquities of the Republic of Cyprus¹³. Steel names her as of the Department in his survey of 1987-1997¹⁰. In 2017 Kiely calls her the current Curator of the Cyprus Museums¹¹.