George H. McFadden

George H. McFadden financed the University of Pennsylvania Museum's excavations at Kourion for nearly twenty years and was the man who did much of the digging. He was born in 1907⁴. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East calls him a Princeton graduate in architecture². Thomas Davis describes him as a lifelong bachelor¹.

The Museum's 1931 dig at Lapithos under Bert Hodge Hill had run out of money. McFadden's funds made possible a new expedition to trace the history of Kourion down to the break-up of the Roman Empire^1,2. It began in 1934. Hill was director and McFadden chief excavator, while John Franklin Daniel dug the city site, Bamboula and the cemeteries⁸. Work continued until 1954 with a pause from 1942 to 1946¹. Megaw called him Assistant Field Director, and Dikaios, Field Director; the titles vary with the author^6,11.

His own ground was the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates. He was its principal excavator throughout, found the Archaic Precinct in 1935 and the Votive Deposit in 1936, which he dug in four sections, and in 1935 relocated the ravine at Ayia Anna where Cesnola had worked³. On 19 November 1935 he found a pithos in the temple naos¹⁰. The authors of the Kourion terracotta volume credit him with a rare gift for archaeological photography, and three of its plates are his³. He wrote up the work in the University Museum Bulletin in 1938 and 1940^14,15 and published his work at the Ayios Ermoyenis necropolis in the American Journal of Archaeology in 1946¹². The expedition's money also paid for Porphyrios Dikaios's excavation at Sotira-Teppes and for the publication of its results^2,11.

At Episkopi he built a two-storey house that served as his home and the expedition's headquarters. Christofis Polykarpou began there as his personal secretary, and local memory holds that McFadden paid his workmen in advance so that they could celebrate Easter^1,9.

His best-known find came late. In the early twentieth century three men had looted a rich tomb at Kaloriziki. Using local memory, McFadden traced one of them, the elderly Socrates Stylianou, and located the tomb between a three-trunked carob and a fig tree. The trench was opened on 31 March 1952, and the tomb was re-excavated as Tomb 40^7,9. McFadden's report on it appeared in the American Journal of Archaeology in 1954, after his death^2,13.

McFadden died in April 1953 when a small sailing boat capsized off the south coast of Cyprus^1,3,6. G. R. Edwards was sent from Philadelphia in September 1953 to settle his affairs, and Benson went with him⁵. According to Davis, a memorial service was cancelled for fear of a demonstration in favour of Enosis, and the house was given to the Department of Antiquities, by his family in Davis's account. It became the Kourion Museum¹. Two of his sisters, Mrs Carolyn B. McFadden and Mrs Emily McFadden Staempfli, helped pay for the printing of Benson's volume on the Kaloriziki necropolis, dedicated to his memory⁴.