George Jeffery

George Jeffery held the post of Curator of Ancient Monuments in Cyprus for some thirty years, restoring Famagusta's fortifications and Bellapais abbey and rebuilding a temple podium at Salamis. He was born in 1855; his birthplace is not recorded. He trained as an architect in London and worked in Italy, Germany and Switzerland in the 1890s, and he was in Jerusalem in 1891 at St George's Cathedral¹.

He first came to Cyprus in 1899 as Inspector of Public Works. The post lasted six months, and disagreements with his superiors forced him out¹. He went back to Jerusalem for about two years and returned to Cyprus in 1903 as Government Architect, and from that appointment developed the title of Curator of Ancient Monuments^1,2. In that role he had a hand in excavation permits, trade policy, the museums and the preservation of monuments, with very little money².

Monuments and museums

Jeffery argued for the protection of medieval buildings and was alarmed by the export of stone from Famagusta to Port Said in 1900. He restored the fortifications of Famagusta, the castle at Kolossi and the abbey at Bellapais, and in 1928 the Lapidary Museum opened in Nicosia as the result of his long campaign for a place to keep medieval remains¹.

His part in the Cyprus Museum was real but informal. An official report quoted by Merrillees records that he sat on no committee and had no standing in the museum, and that he supervised the transfer of objects to the new building in 1909 without being paid for it. Merrillees also says that Hamilton Goold-Adams, High Commissioner from 1911 to 1914, raised his honorarium, which had been £80 a year, and authorised an extension to the museum³. Trélat says the museum building went up between 1907 and 1918, with the Athenian architect Nikolaos Balanos working beside him¹.

He also spoke on the trade. In 1925, during the debate on amending the Antiquities Law of 1905, he told the government that the Cyprus Museum's buying and selling of antiquities was feeding the illicit market. The amendment that followed made the Swedish Cyprus Expedition possible⁵.

Salamis and Nicosia

In 1924 Jeffery rebuilt the podium of the fallen temple at the south end of the "agora" at Salamis so that visitors could see it, and he presented the ruins in the following years. Vassos Karageorghis, writing in the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique, says that the work was left unfinished and that it, together with the English dig of 1890, caused deep disturbance of the temple^6,7.

On 29 January 1927 the Museum Committee decided that Jeffery should excavate at two sites in Nicosia under the supervision of Rupert Gunnis. Stanley-Price notes that Gunnis was the less experienced of the two. Gunnis wrote in his diary on 5 February 1927 of "that old idiot Jeffery"⁵.

Writing

In 1916 Jeffery presented "The Earlier Byzantine Churches of Cyprus" to the Society of Antiquaries of London, the first survey of the island's Byzantine church types. Davis and Stewart describe some of its judgements as now outdated, among them his dating of the mosaics at Kiti and Kanakaria to the eleventh or twelfth century². His A Description of the Historic Monuments of Cyprus appeared in Nicosia in 1918⁹, and "The heraldry of Cyprus" in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1920¹⁰. He edited a new edition of Claude Delaval Cobham's An Attempt at a Bibliography of Cyprus in 1929^8,11.

Retirement and diaries

Jeffery retired at the end of 1934. Trélat and Stanley-Price give that date, while Davis and Stewart have him holding the curatorship until 1936. He became honorary adviser to the new Department of Antiquities under John Hilton, who lived near him, saw him often and witnessed his will. He died in April 1935; Hilton was a pall-bearer at the funeral and wrote his obituary⁴. His six diaries, covering 1898 to 1935, are in the Cyprus Museum archive, and Despina Pilides published them with part of his correspondence in two volumes in 2009¹.