Georgios M. Soteriou

In March 1930 Archbishop Kyrillos III asked the Academy of Athens for an expert in Byzantine art to study and catalogue the monuments of Cyprus, partly because the Church had lost two hoards of early Christian metalwork to the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum². The Academy sent Georgios Soteriou in August 1931. He was a professor at the University of Athens and died in 1965¹. Davis and Stewart describe the visit as an invitation from the Church to make an architectural survey, for which he hired the Cypriot architects J. Pericleous and Theophilus Mogabgab to draw plans and elevations and C. Papaioannou to take photographs¹. On 17 September 1931 he proposed an office at the Archbishopric to collect and maintain Byzantine monuments and portable antiquities such as icons and holy vessels².

A preliminary report appeared in the Academy's publication in 1931, and after two more trips he published volume 1 of The Byzantine Monuments of Cyprus in 1935. He planned a second volume of history and dating. It never appeared, and no manuscript was found after his death¹. A. H. S. Megaw later followed him in employing Pericleous and Mogabgab¹.

In 1936 the Church Committee and Soteriou studied the 112 icons gathered at Panagia Phaneromeni in Nicosia, and he prepared a plan for their display in the Byzantine Museum². A history of Salamis says the position of the relics of Barnabas south of the chancel of the katholikon "was fixed by the excavations of George Soteriou in the 1930s", and lists his 1937 article on the church and tomb of Barnabas³.