Leto Severis

Leto Severis had her admission papers from the New York Institute of Archaeology in hand when her mother refused to let her study, and she went on to build, in the family house in Nicosia, a private collection that her son counts at more than 2,500 inventoried Cypriot antiquities¹. When Vassos Karageorghis catalogued it, he named the Severis Collection with the Hadjiprodromou Collection of Famagusta and the Pierides Collection of Larnaca as the most important of the large private collections that Cypriots formed in the 1960s and early 1970s¹.

A historian without a teacher

She was born in 1916 and raised in Nicosia; her son prints her maiden name as Leto Lybouridou^1,11. In that account a visit to the Cyprus Museum at the age of eight started her interest in the island's history. After graduating from the Athens American College she decided to become an archaeologist, but her mother, who thought she should marry and keep house instead of "digging in the earth for earthenware", rejected the request. Leto resolved to become a historian without a teacher¹.

In 1936 she married Costakis Severis, who, her son says, encouraged both her studies and her wish to start a collection. Her father-in-law, Demosthenis Severis, had been born in Kythrea in the late nineteenth century and had moved to Kyrenia by the time of the wedding. Villagers who found antiquities around Lapithos and Lambousa offered them to him first, as he was a known buyer, and his collection was well advanced when Leto joined the family. She began her own through him, and by the early 1940s, her son writes, it was "taking shape"¹.

Collecting under the silent accord

Her son says that after the Second World War more antiquities came onto the market, under laws looser than later ones, with acquisition "almost unrestricted, provided it was not for export". For 28 years she aimed at a collection representative of all Cypriot ancient art, with as many pieces of exceptional quality or rarity as she could find and afford¹.

Karageorghis, who says he followed the collection "from the very beginning", dates its formation differently: "mainly during the decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s", when looting was taking place in Turkish Cypriot villages that the Republic's authorities did not control. The Department of Antiquities followed a policy he calls "silent accord", allowing Cypriots with access to the enclaves to buy the "spoils" so that they would stay in the country. The owners of the large collections were asked to declare them to the Department in the last six months of 1973¹. He names Souskiou, Marki, Kotchati and Alaas as the cemeteries where looting was concentrated and says the collection has material that may have come from them: Chalcolithic bowls and two animal-shaped vases from Souskiou, some Red Polished (Philia) pottery from Marki-Davari, some Middle Bronze Age White Painted ware from the cemetery near Galinoporni. The Proto-White Painted pottery, he writes, was "according to information provided by the late Leto Severis" bought in the village of Patriki in 1973, and he has "no doubt" that it came from the Alaas cemetery, where the Department excavated unlooted tombs later that year¹. These attributions are his own inferences.

In 2014 Samuel Andrew Hardy examined the catalogued pieces as evidence for the antiquities trade of the Cypriot civil war. Of the 288 objects in the two editions, he reports that 211 (73.26 per cent) carry no information about their origin. He writes that "all of the 288 catalogued artefacts were probably looted during the civil war", and of the 77 with find-spots he judges that 42 were probably looted by Turkish Cypriots and 35 by Greek Cypriots³. His argument rests on the silent accord and the catalogues; it names no act by Leto Severis, and no proceedings against her are reported.

After July 1974

When Turkish troops entered northern Cyprus in July 1974 the family became refugees and she stopped collecting. Her son says she never gave the real reason, except once, when she compared her interest to "that pure, beautiful Cypro-Archaic floral pot that has been cracked for ever". Maybe also, he adds, because part of the collection, about 600 pieces, was looted and "disappeared for ever". By that July the collection had over 2,500 pieces, each numbered and inventoried with a description, in a gallery of the Nicosia house that had become a private museum, "more for study than for public viewing"¹.

She helped organise the Friends of Archaeology, and her son records that in 1978 she organised an exhibition of part of the collection at the Royal Museum of Mariemont in Belgium¹. At the age of eighty she wrote a book on the Frankish period, which he calls "Great ladies of Medieval Cyprus". A year later, about a fortnight before an accident that proved fatal, she wrote the last chapter of a history of Cyprus for children¹. She died in 1997¹¹. The children's history appeared in 1999, written with Maria Pyliotou, as Join us and discover the History of Cyprus from the Costakis and Leto Severis Foundation⁶.

The same foundation published Karageorghis's catalogue of 257 pieces in 1999⁵. At the end of 2009 her son, Demosthenis C. Severis, by then the owner, decided to place all of it on long-term loan to the new Constantine Leventis Wing of the Leventis Municipal Museum in Nicosia, and added 31 pieces to the second edition of the catalogue, which was published in 2010 and dedicated to her^1,3.