Ewdoksia Papuci-Władyka

In 2010 Ewdoksia Papuci-Władyka, a specialist in Hellenistic pottery, received the first excavation licence for the Agora of Nea Paphos from the Department of Antiquities, at a site that Kyriakos Nicolaou had dug between 1968 and 1978¹. She first went to Cyprus in 1984 and joined the Polish Mission of the Kazimierz Michałowski Warsaw University Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, which had been working at Paphos since 1965¹.

The Polish Mission

The mission was led by Wiktor Andrzej Daszewski until 2007 and then by Henryk Meyza. Papuci-Władyka worked with it until 2010, taking part almost every year, with her students, in the excavations and in working up the finds¹. A photograph of 1984 shows her at the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Paphos with Z. Sztetyłło, Daszewski and S. Medeksza, and another of 1993 shows her with Meyza and J. Młynarczyk sorting pottery in the mission's storeroom¹.

Her own subject was Hellenistic pottery. In 1995 she published Nea Pafos. Studia nad ceramiką hellenistyczną z polskich wykopalisk (1965-1991), a study of the pottery from the Polish excavations². Papers followed on the cistern south of the Villa of Theseus³, the Hellenistic pottery from the Maloutena sector⁴, the Roman-period pottery from the eastern part of the Hellenistic House⁵, and a survey of the contribution of Kraków archaeologists to the work at Nea Paphos⁶. In 2013 a special volume of Studies in Ancient Art and Civilization (17) was published on the occasion of her 35 years of academic career¹.

The Agora

In 2010 she decided to create a mission of her own for the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. After agreement with Maria Hadjicosti, then Director of the Department of Antiquities, received from her the licence¹. The Agora had been excavated earlier by Nicolaou. His documentation is not available to researchers, and the Kraków team holds that his chronology needs re-evaluation¹.

The Paphos Agora Project began digging in 2011. Between 2011 and 2014 the work concentrated on the East Portico, the centre of the square, the southern entrance and the south-east corner of the Agora¹. The project is international and interdisciplinary and is the compulsory field training for Jagiellonian archaeology students; by 2015 about 120 students and volunteers and more than 60 specialists had taken part¹. Funding came from the Polish National Science Centre, through the OPUS grant 2011/01/B/HS3/01282 and the MAESTRO grant 2014/14/A/HS3/00283¹. In 2015 the team began a non-invasive survey, using geophysics and remote sensing, over the rest of the Archaeological Park outside the Agora¹. The 2020 volume thanks the Department's director, Marina Solomidou-Ieronymidou, for permission to excavate the Agora¹.

Publication

Exhibitions on the project were held in Kraków (2014 and 2016), Katowice, Bielsko-Biała, Poznań, the Paphos Visitors Centre (2017) and Nicosia (2018)¹. In 2018 she and Łukasz Miszk, Wojciech Machowski and others published the first preliminary report on the 2011-2014 seasons in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus⁷. She also edited a popular bilingual book on Paphos in the same year¹. In 2020 she edited Paphos Agora Project (PAP) I, the first results of the seasons 2011-2015, published in Kraków by Historia Iagellonica⁸.