Giorgos Bourogiannis

More than 100,000 sherds from the Ayia Irini sanctuary lay unpublished in Stockholm, and Giorgos Bourogiannis has worked on them since 2011. He calls the sanctuary the core of a research project at the Medelhavsmuseet that began that year. He gives three reasons for choosing it: its importance, the need to clarify its history, and the location of the excavated area in a military zone in the occupied north, where legitimate fieldwork is not possible. A main aim is to use the pottery to clarify the site's history and periodization¹.

The material comes from the Swedish Cyprus Expedition of 1927 to 1931 under Einar Gjerstad. About 18,000 objects were recovered, and two thirds of them, with all useful sherds, went to Sweden in 1931 to form the core of the museum's Cypriot collection. The Ayia Irini dig began in November 1929 under Erik Sjöqvist and was published by Gjerstad in 1935, with almost 2,000 terracottas¹. Bourogiannis gave the project's aims in a chapter of Ancient Cyprus Today (2016)² and wrote on the expedition in the 2021 Turin catalogue edited by Bombardieri and Panero⁵.

In 2015 he was printed as A.G. Leventis Postdoctoral Research Fellow and SilCoinCy Research Associate at the National Hellenic Research Foundation, and as editor, with Chryssa Panagiotopoulou, of the Kyprios Character website¹. He edited Ancient Cyprus Today: Museum Collections and New Research with C. Muhlenbock⁴, and later edited Beyond Cyprus, on Cypriot connectivity in the Mediterranean from the Late Bronze Age to the end of the Classical period⁶.