George M. Michaelides

George M. Michaelides, a Nicosia architect, inherited a collection of Cypriot pottery from John Vergopoulos, whom Vassos Karageorghis called "a prominent citizen of Nicosia". Karageorghis saw it for the first time in 1965 and described it as rich in Proto-White Painted vases, including rare pictorial ones and new shapes, "almost completely unknown to scholars"¹. Its Mycenaean and Proto-White Painted vases form section IV of Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, Cyprus 2, published that year¹. Karageorghis's report for 1967 called the collection one of the most important on the island and published three pieces from it: a Syrian bichrome jug, a Base Ring bull vase and a Bichrome IV amphora with a fish frieze².

In 1968, according to Karageorghis, "thanks to a very generous grant of the Government, the Cyprus Museum acquired one of the largest private collections on the island, the Georges Michaelides collection of Nicosia, about 800 objects of every kind and period"³. Kyriakos Nicolaou describes it as mainly pottery from the Early Bronze Age to the Byzantine period. He lists a Red Polished jug, a Mycenaean IIIA:2 stirrup jar, a Bichrome III amphora, an Attic black-figure kylix and amphora, a Corinthian skyphos and a small limestone sarcophagus, with inventory numbers of the form 1968/V-30⁴. The price paid and the date of Michaelides's death are not recorded.