Maria Hadjicosti

On 1 February 2010 Maria Hadjicosti became Director of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, the first woman to hold the post, succeeding Pavlos Flourentzos after a period as Acting Director¹. She had joined the Department in 1979.

She studied classical archaeology and history at Charles University in Prague and took her Ph.D. there in 1976 with a thesis titled "The Iconography of Aphrodite in Cypriote Art"¹. In her own account she was a native of Ormideia³. After joining the Department she took part in excavations at Kition, Pyla-Kokkinokremnos and Maa-Palaeokastro¹. Her study of the "Canaanite" jars from Maa-Palaeokastro appeared in 1988 in the excavation volume edited by Vassos Karageorghis and Demas¹².

Tombs and rescue digs

From 1986 to 1994 she was Archaeological Officer and then Officer A'¹. Her excavations in these years included several tombs. A Late Cypriot tomb at Mathiatis (1988) turned up during water-pipe works, and she published its Tomb 2 in the Department's Report^5,13. Six chamber tombs of the Cypro-Archaic and Cypro-Classical periods at Agioi Omologites in Nicosia followed in 1991, with a publication in 1993^5,14. A Cypro-Archaic tomb at Mari was excavated in 1997⁵. At Sanidha she worked with Ian A. Todd, and their report on the 1990 excavations appeared in the Department's Report for 1991¹¹. CAARI's note on her appointment adds trial excavations at Pyla-Koutsopetria in 1993 and 1999¹.

At Ormideia in 1991 she supervised the rescue excavation of a Hellenistic-Roman public building at Lakkos Glykys, in a house yard³. She later studied the Ormideia finds at the suggestion of Olivier Masson, who on 8 December 1996 wrote to propose a joint article on the site³. Her chapter on Ormideia and Cesnola's footsteps came out in 2001 in the British Museum colloquium volume on nineteenth-century Cyprus³.

Idalion

In 1991 she began the Department's scheduled excavations at Idalion, on the north lower sloping terrace of Ampileri (Ambeleri), east of the earlier American excavations². From 1992 the trenches exposed four adjoining rooms holding pithoi, figurines, coins and many inscribed ostraka in the Cypriot syllabary and in Phoenician⁶. Pamela Gaber, who directed a parallel project in the lower city, credits her with the Phoenician administrative complex dated to about 450 BCE, with the pithos-making installations of the Late Cypriot and Geometric periods, and with the 1992 salvage excavation at Dhali, where pipe-laying under the road to Limpia exposed extensive Hellenistic structures⁷. Maurice Sznycer studied the Phoenician ink ostraka from the site at her invitation¹⁰. She summarised the evidence in "The Kingdom of Idalion in the Light of New Evidence" in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research in 1997¹⁵ and wrote a chapter in Greek on the Idalion archive, published in 2017¹⁶.

Monuments, museums and the directorship

In 1991 a UNESCO grant supported her postgraduate studies in museology, and she went on to organise local and site museums and exhibitions in Cyprus and abroad¹. She was Head Curator of Monuments from 1998 to 2006, responsible for the restoration and management of archaeological sites, and Head Curator of Museums from 2006, with all state museums in her charge¹. The displays of the Local Museum of Marion and Arsinoe at Polis, which opened in 2000, were her choice⁸.

As Director she gave Ewdoksia Papuci-Władyka of the Jagiellonian University the first excavation licence for the Agora of Nea Paphos, and the Paphos Agora Project began in 2011⁹. In 2012 the Department under her direction lent finds from Polis to the City of Gold exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum, and she wrote the Director's foreword to its catalogue⁸.