G. Roux

Georges Roux excavated the Campanopetra basilica at Salamis, a large Early Christian church complex, and published it in 1998 as La basilique de la Campanopetra¹¹. He was a professor at Lyon. Reports of the 1970 and 1972 seasons describe the Lyon expedition as headed by Profs. Jean Pouilloux and Georges Roux^3,4.

Pouilloux had invited Roux, whom he called a colleague and friend, on the first exploratory trip to Cyprus in 1964. Roux withdrew at the last moment and Jean Jehasse went in his place⁶. In the first Lyon campaign, in spring 1965, Roux was working at the temple site. A chance discovery of an eleventh-century BC tomb beneath Roman houses led him to interrupt that work and excavate the fourth-century AD houses instead, while exploration around the standing stone known as Campanopetra uncovered the west part of a large basilica buried in sand⁷. Over about a decade the team cleared the coastal dune with a light railway and trucks⁷.

In the report on the 1969 campaign, Vassos Karageorghis wrote that Roux had catalogued and described the many architectural fragments from the building¹. The 1970 report by Pouilloux and Roux states that the exploration of the basilica was conducted by G. Roux with the assistance of Bruno Helly, and calls the complex one of the largest and most complicated Byzantine ensembles in the Near East². Excavation stopped in 1974, when most of the monument had been uncovered¹⁰.

In his 1998 volume Roux interpreted the basilica as a pilgrimage church, with relics of the True Cross in the east atrium, and read rooms off the west atrium as cells of a monastic community¹⁰. A 2019 chapter on the basilica is dedicated to his memory¹⁰. His dates of birth and death are not recorded.