Franz Georg Maier

Franz Georg Maier arrived at Kouklia in 1952 as a young field assistant and was still excavating the sanctuary of Aphrodite there in 2007-08, as director of the Palaepaphos excavations from 1966¹. He was born in Stuttgart in 1926 and studied at Tübingen, Zurich and Rome between 1945 and 1952¹. The Tübingen linguist Ernst Sittig recommended him and Jörg Schäfer to Terence Mitford, who with J. H. Iliffe directed the British Kouklia Expedition¹. The dig worked under licences from A. H. S. Megaw, Director of Antiquities^2,4.

The rampart at Marchello

Maier joined the expedition in 1952 as field assistant and draughtsman. From 1953 to 1955 he was in charge of Site A at Marchello, where the team uncovered a stretch of the Palaepaphos rampart, the north-east gate and the Persian siege ramp^1,4. The fill of the ramp held a large quantity of Archaic stone sculpture and votive inscriptions¹. He picked up sherds at Arkalon in 1952 and later kept Iliffe's field diary of 1951^2,3.

Political events interrupted the Kouklia work in 1956. Maier took a scholarship from the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and wrote his Habilitation on Greek inscriptions concerning city walls and fortresses, which he completed at Tübingen in 1957. He lectured there until 1963, became professor at Konstanz in 1966 and held the chair of ancient history at Zurich from 1972 to 1994¹. His book Cypern. Insel am Kreuzweg der Geschichte appeared in 1964¹.

Directing Palaepaphos

In 1966 Maier took over a new DAI-sponsored excavation at Palaepaphos, run first from Konstanz and then from Zurich. Until 1972 it worked in the rampart area, and then moved to the sanctuary of Aphrodite, whose Late Bronze Age phase the British excavators of 1888 had missed¹. Maier later recalled that Megaw, visiting the dig in 1970, said he would not tolerate a foreign expedition working for years at Kouklia without tackling the Temple. Maier had preferred to dig the eastern settlement at Evreti and Asproyi. By his account the sanctuary excavation began in 1973, after three more years and some string-pulling by Vassos Karageorghis, then Director of the Department of Antiquities².

From 1980 he excavated the cane-sugar refinery at Kouklia-Stavros with Marie-Louise von Wartburg, who became his wife in 1992¹. In 1990 and 1991 he investigated the large rock-cut royal tomb known as the Spilaion tis Regainas at Arkalon. Olivier Masson had long suggested it as a royal tomb, and Hammer von Purgstall had first recorded it on a visit in 1802³. Work in the sanctuary ended in 2007-08¹.

Publications and a press campaign

With Karageorghis, Maier wrote Paphos: History and Archaeology (1984), a book of 383 pages, and he published Alt-Paphos auf Cypern in 1985^1,5. He founded and edited the DAI series Ausgrabungen in Alt-Paphos auf Cypern, eight volumes between 1977 and 2013. It carried work by other scholars: Mitford and Masson on the syllabic inscriptions of Rantidi (volume 2, 1983) and of Kouklia (volume 4, 1986), and Karageorghis on the excavation at Skales (volume 3, 1983). His own volume 6 (2008) treated the north-east gate and the siege ramp^1,8. He also wrote the Cyprus chapters of the Cambridge Ancient History (1994) and of the Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (2004), and a Guide to Palaipaphos (2004)¹.

Summerer writes that in the 1960s Maier said the 1960 Constitution could work only if Turkish Cypriots were recognised as full citizens and not as an ethnic minority, that this made him enemies, and that in the 1990s he was bitterly attacked in the local press for his supposedly pro-Turkish opinion⁹.

Maier died in 2014¹.