Kyriakos Nicolaou

Kyriakos Nicolaou ran the Cyprus Museum and every other state museum on the island from 1964 to 1978, and from 1962 to 1973 he directed the excavation of the mosaic villa at Kato Paphos known as the House of Dionysos. He was born in 1918 and died in 1981. He took a doctorate at the University of Gothenburg, where his dissertation appeared in 1976, and Thomas Kiely adds a first degree from the University of London^1,6.

In his own account of his career he was Assistant Archaeological Officer in the Department of Antiquities from 1957 to 1961, Assistant Curator of the Cyprus Museum from 1961 to 1964, and Curator from 1964 until he retired on 1 November 1978².

Survey and rescue digs

His first work was on the Archaeological Survey, which he joined in 1957 and 1958 under Hector W. Catling. After Catling left in 1959, Nicolaou ran it, recording Neolithic and Bronze Age sites and a Middle Bronze Age fort near Krini on the Kyrenia range³. In 1960 he conducted emergency excavations at Kafkalla near Dhenia³.

Michaelides's entry on him in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East lists his main excavations as the Hellenistic sanctuary of Aphrodite at Morphou, the Late Bronze Age cemeteries of Deneia, Angastina and Kazaphani, Geometric cemeteries at Marion and Kythraia, and many Hellenistic and Roman tombs at Nea Paphos¹.

Nea Paphos

In 1962 mosaics turned up in a ploughed field at Kato Paphos, and Nicolaou excavated the site until 1973. It proved to be a Roman villa of the 3rd century AD built on a Hellenistic building, with about 2,500 Ptolemaic silver tetradrachms⁴. This was the House of Dionysos. He went on to excavate the Odeion and to begin work on the gymnasium and the Asklepieion¹.

He also searched for the Hercules mosaic, buried in 1942. After several trial trenches he found it, but left it unexcavated; digging there began only in 1982^1,5.

The museums

As Curator he reorganised the stores and displays of the Cyprus Museum. He founded the district museums of Famagusta, Larnaca, Limassol and Paphos, and several local museums¹.

He wrote the Cyprus surveys in Archaeological Reports, the guidebook Nea Paphos (1967) and Ancient Monuments of Cyprus (1968)¹. He retired in November 1978 and died in 1981.