Loiso Anastasi

Loiso Anastasi mended and packed the finds of Max Ohnefalsch-Richter in Cyprus. Ohnefalsch-Richter describes him in Kypros, the Bible and Homer (1893) as a man from Dali who knew how to write, whom he trained to clean, wash, join and plaster broken fragments. He says Loiso helped with his photography, developed all his paper negatives and became "a most accomplished packer"¹. Buchholz calls him the restorer Loisos Anastasi of Idalion⁴.

Recke writes that he and Gregori Antoniou had worked for Ohnefalsch-Richter since 1880 and were foremen on the 1885 excavation at Pera-Frangissa near Tamassos, where a photograph of Loiso was taken³. At Tamassos, Ohnefalsch-Richter writes that "Loiso and I" cleaned and put together the lion-hunt vase at the monastery of Ayios Heraklides after it had been lifted piece by piece from a deep earth tomb. The passage gives no surname, so the identification with Loiso Anastasi rests on the name and the work¹.

A photograph taken at the end of the 1894 excavation on the acropolis of Idalion shows him holding a stele topped with a palmette, beside Abraami Charalambos and Kostis Kafedschis, the coffee-house keeper of Dali. Ohnefalsch-Richter's text there says he trained Loiso as a restorer and as a copier of photographs².