Marie-Louise Winbladh

Marie-Louise Winbladh looked after the Cypriot antiquities that the Swedish Cyprus Expedition of 1927 to 1931 brought to Stockholm. She was curator of the Cyprus Collections at the Medelhavsmuseet from 1971 to 2007, and of its Greek and Roman Collections from 1971 to 2001². Her own fieldwork was in Greece: she took part in excavations there from 1972 to 1991, and by her own account in 2023 had been a member since 1974 of the Danish-Greek-Swedish excavations at Chania in western Crete^1,2.

Her publications on the collection begin with Cypriote Antiquities in the Medelhavsmuseet, Stockholm (1977), written with Vassos Karageorghis and Carl-Gustaf Styrenius⁵. In 1997 she edited An Archaeological Adventure in Cyprus, an account of the expedition told with contemporary photographs⁶. Her chapter on the open-air sanctuary at Ayia Irini appeared in Karageorghis's volume on the museum's Cyprus collections in 2003⁷.

In a chapter published in 2023 she recorded that the expedition found about 18,000 objects, of which about 12,000 (65 per cent) went to Sweden, and that a database of most of the ceramics and terracottas was made in 2005¹. The same chapter describes the museum's Cypriot exhibitions, among them the permanent display of 1989 and a late-1990s installation, The Fragrant Garden of Aphrodite, for which Reinhard Senff sent photographs of his reconstruction of the Apollo temple at Idalion¹. It also tells how an Ayia Irini terracotta statue, the "Priest", was damaged by condensation during the 1977 exhibition After the Flood and could never be restored¹.