Harry Luke

Harry Luke, born in 1884³, dug tombs at weekends in the Kyrenia hills with the High Commissioner of Cyprus. His account of this, written as a tribute to Sir Hamilton Goold-Adams and quoted by Merrillees, says that Goold-Adams "granted himself an excavator's licence" and that he, Lady Goold-Adams and Luke "spent many a week-end at Phylleri in a fold of the Kyrenia Mountains, unearthing and clearing ancient tombs"². The quotation gives no date, finds or division of them. Luke was Private Secretary to the High Commissioner in 1911-12 and Commissioner of Famagusta in 1918-20³. Maier cites him as Commissioner of Paphos in 1917, in a note on mothers without milk who still went to the conical stone at the Kouklia sanctuary⁵.

Merrillees also quotes two other tributes from him: one to Claude Delaval Cobham, Commissioner of Larnaca, as "a scholar and a gentleman"², and one to George Jeffery, Curator of Ancient Monuments, whom he praised against the Government's niggardliness before Goold-Adams².

He then wrote on the island's history: Cyprus under the Turks 1571-1878 (1921) and a translation of Savorgnano's Discritzione delle cose di Cipro (1932)⁷, the edition of volume IV of George Hill's History of Cyprus (1952)¹⁰, and Cyprus: A Portrait and an Appreciation (1957)⁴. Maier criticises him for repeating, as plain fact, Ross's story that Paphos peasants called a church at Kouklia Panayia Aphroditissa⁶.

Luke also owned antiquities on a small scale. Metcalf reports three Byzantine lead seals from the 1930s "from the collections of Sir Harry Luke", one of them of Pantherios, bishop of Aradus, which Professor J. R. Stewart acquired from that collection and ticketed "found in Cyprus"⁸.