George Basil Palma

George Basil Palma ran the Phoenix Pharmacy on Hermes Street in Famagusta and kept the largest of the 30-odd private antiquities collections declared in the town and in Varosha under the 1935 Antiquities Law¹. He was born about 1868, a date worked back from a newspaper notice of April 1952 that gave his age at death as 84¹. Museum records and the 1931 and 1936 directories spell his surname Palmas, while his descendants use Palma¹.

The pharmacy and the family

Family tradition says he was an orphan brought up at Pyrga who took the name Palma, but his granddaughter doubted it because his brothers also bore the name; R. S. Merrillees calls the origin of the name obscure¹. The family remembered his training as a chemist as London. A letterhead and Merrillees point to Edinburgh, and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society found no record of him¹. The pharmacy's letterhead gives its founding as 1905¹. His first wife, Evrythiki Stavrinidou, died in 1910, according to family tradition; he later married Mary English of Alderney, and the couple had six children¹. In 1937 a daughter often brought his consignments to the Department of Antiquities for export licences¹.

The collection was divided between the pharmacy, where jewellery was kept in a cupboard behind his desk and amphorae stood on show, and a room at his house¹. No inventory survives in the family. In May 1925 he sold seven fragmentary elephant molars from a well at Athna to the Natural History Museum in London¹. Vassos Karageorghis told Merrillees that Palma was known in the village of Enkomi as a buyer of finds from looters; Merrillees himself writes that there is "no evidence whatever" that Palma dug illicitly, though he may have profited from the digging of others¹. Dr Pavlos Flourentzos, in 2007, doubted the propriety of his acquisitions¹.

The raid of 1927

According to John Hilton's memorandum of 1935, printed by Nicholas Stanley-Price, Palma submitted a list of his collection to the Cyprus Museum on 6 April 1924 and was allowed to keep the objects.² Menelaos Markides, the Museum's curator, sometimes took pieces from it for the Museum, and Hilton states that on at least one occasion Markides authorised him in writing to buy for the Museum².

In 1927 Rupert Gunnis sent the police to seize the whole collection. Merrillees, citing Gunnis's diary, dates the raid to 15 December 1927 and says that two people in Famagusta were suspected of obtaining antiquities from illicit diggings at Enkomi Ayios Iakovos¹. Palma answered that Markides had authorised his purchases, and according to the diary he petitioned Gunnis the next day, Gunnis agreeing if the collection went to the Museum¹. Hilton's account has Markides arriving the day after the seizure and Palma signing a paper that handed everything over on a promise of no prosecution². No court case followed. Merrillees notes that Gunnis was digging at the same site in those days and thinks the raid "reads more like pique than policing"¹. In 1938 Palma was still asking for the confiscated objects back¹.

Declaring, dealing, giving

On 17 March 1936 Palma sent the Director of Antiquities a full list of his collection¹. In 1937 he was a Licensed Dealer in Antiquities, and his permit was renewed for 1938; the last item in his file is a letter to A. H. S. Megaw of 27 January 1938¹. Pieces of exceptional quality that were refused an export licence were bought by or given to the Museum, or returned to him to sell to collectors and dealers in Cyprus¹. His buyers included Toby O'Brien Hubbard and Francis Milverton Drake, and in August 1937 J. R. B. Stewart, who took a small winged horse and about 60 Lusignan coins¹. He bought objects from Epaminondas Skeparnides of Trikomo in May 1937¹.

The Cyprus Museum bought three White Painted vases from him in 1935, said to come from a tomb at Enkomi, and a miniature copper ingot in 1936¹. In 1938 and 1939 it bought a stamp seal, a terracotta head of a woman with a turreted crown, and gold jewellery, and in 1939 he gave it a full-size ingot, also said to be from Enkomi¹. The last purchases in his lifetime were two White Painted vessels in 1951¹. Merrillees corrects earlier writers on two bronze sceptres: neither is documented as coming from Palma¹.

After 1952

Palma died at 19 Hercules Street, Famagusta, in April 1952, without a will¹. His daughter Kinga and his son Byron, called Johny, took items from the collection, and family tradition holds that Kinga disposed of the rest without consulting her relatives¹. Kinga sold the Cyprus Museum more than 30 coins in 1953 and about 78 items of jewellery in 1954¹. In March 1954 the Museum bought from her the gold granulated pomegranate pendant (CM 1954/III-24/1), which Megaw described that year as coming "indubitably from Enkomi"^1,3. Family belief that the pendant had gone to the British Museum was mistaken, and the British Museum holds no record of receiving anything from him¹.