Georg Freiherr von Millosicz

In June 1871 an Austrian admiral anchored at Larnaca bought a 201 cm limestone votive statue from Robert Lang, and the statue is now in Vienna. Georg Freiherr von Millosicz (also spelled Millosich) was born in 1819 and died in 1890¹. The authority record gives 18 October 1819 at Botosani and 24 July 1890 at Leoben². He rose to Vizeadmiral in the Austrian navy, was Contre-Admiral from 1870, and from 1871 to 1883 served as deputy chief of the Marine Section of the War Ministry¹.

The cruise of the Habsburg

During a long station in the eastern Mediterranean in 1871 he dug near Smyrna with the permission of the Porte and bought newly found sculpture there for the Münz- und Antikenkabinett in Vienna¹. On 24 April 1871 he wrote from Smyrna to its director, Eduard von Sacken, that he would sail to Cyprus, where "diligent digging and exporting" was reported¹. The cruise of the frigate Habsburg began on 19 May 1871 and ran from Asia Minor by way of Cyprus to the Syrian coast¹.

On 24 July he reported to Sacken a large quantity of lesser marble pieces, enclosing three photographs, and a small collection of fragments, statuettes, reliefs, terracottas, lamps, cylixes, craters and lacrimaria, bought in 32 places¹. In the same letter he wrote that Levantine dealers regarded him as a competitor and that a report in the Pall Mall Gazette had him loading several frigates¹.

The Pyla statue

His best-known purchase was the colossal bearded votive statue from the sanctuary at Pyla, 201 cm high and dated by the Vienna museum to about 500 BCE¹. It belonged to Robert Hamilton Lang. Millosicz's letter to Sacken calls it a terracotta found at Dhali, intended for England until a quarrel with its owner, and says he paid 120 florins, Lang having asked him not to publish the low price; Seipel corrects the description to limestone from Pyla¹. In the same letter he described Lang as a wealthy gentleman and representative of the British consulate, and wrote that Luigi Palma di Cesnola was overcharging¹.

Lang recalled the sale in a 1905 article in Blackwood's Magazine, quoted by Seipel. In it the admiral, anchored at Larnaca in June 1871, told him "Sell it to me and I shall try to take it away", and sailors carried the statue off after sundown on a litter, past a customs watchman¹. An obituary of Millosicz, also quoted by Seipel, dates the episode to 1870 and has him hide the statue in the consulate and remove it during a ball, with the figure disguised as a sick midshipman in a hammock borne by eight sailors¹. The two accounts differ on the year and on the method. Seipel states that the export went against the Ottoman rules in force¹.

The Imperial Antikensammlung bought the statue from him on 12 January 1872, with the approval of the Lord Chamberlain; it is catalogued as Antikensammlung I 341¹.

The Sammlung Millosicz

The 1871 purchases formed the core of the "Sammlung Millosicz". W. Gurlitt catalogued it in 1877 in the Archaeologisch-epigraphische Mitteilungen³, and Millosicz issued his own first part in 1885 as Sammlung Millosicz in Wien, which dealt mainly with Greek material¹. In 1889 he gave the museum the upper part of a limestone statuette of a male votary, 50 cm high, of the Cypro-Archaic II period (I 623)¹.

After his death the Emperor approved, on 20 October 1890, the purchase from his heir, his minor daughter Hermine, of 1,094 coins and 250 archaeological objects for 8,000 gulden¹. About a hundred of the objects were Cypriot: some fifty vases, 31 terracotta figurines and small limestone sculptures, which Seipel supposes he bought in June 1871 at Dhali, Larnaca and Famagusta¹. Among them is a limestone statuette of a youth, 70.5 cm high (I 625)¹. In the autumn of 1890 Max Ohnefalsch-Richter visited Vienna and received ten antiquities in exchange for duplicates from the Millosicz holdings¹. The Pyla statue and the pieces from his estate remain in the Kunsthistorisches Museum¹.