Eustathios Raptou

Eustathios Raptou (also written Efstathios) worked for the Department of Antiquities in the Paphos district, where he directed rescue and research excavations. The acknowledgements of the 2012 catalogue City of Gold name him among the regional directors of the Paphos district, with Dimitris Michaelides, Sophocles Sophocleous and Yiannis Ionas⁵. His dates of birth and death, his education and the dates of his tenure are not recorded in the publications that mention him.

He worked at the cemetery at Palaepaphos-Skales, where Vassos Karageorghis had dug in 1979. He resumed work there in the autumn of 2008, about thirty years later, as salvage excavation ahead of building permits, paid for by the landowners; further tombs followed in the winter and spring of 2011¹. In the 2016 publication of the tombs he wrote the chapter on the excavations, tomb architecture and burial customs, and an appendix on the terracotta figurines, while Vassos Karageorghis wrote the catalogue and commentary¹. The two men divided a 2014 volume on the Palaepaphos necropoleis in the same way².

At Polis Chrysochous he carried out rescue work from the 2000s. City of Gold records a possible funerary monument excavated in 2010, tombs with gold jewellery and imported Greek vessels, large female statues opposite the Maratheri sanctuary, and Hellenistic workshops south of the Princeton excavation area, and he wrote catalogue entries for it⁵. The bibliography of the Paphos Agora Project lists his articles on a painted Roman tomb (2004), the built tomb in Icarus street (2006) and the Ellinospilioi tombs (2008, with A. Marangou), as well as a 2016 chapter on the periphery of Paphos⁶. He is named as a co-editor, with C. Balandier and Dimitris Michaelides, of a volume on Nea Paphos and western Cyprus, listed as forthcoming in 2020⁶.

Summerer (2023) names him as the first to publish a rock-cut tomb found in 2008 at Koma tou Gialou, and uses it as an example in an argument about "undercover research"⁷.