Matthias Recke

In October 2020 a survey directed by Matthias Recke located the sanctuary of Apollo at Frangissa near Pera Orinis, which Max Ohnefalsch-Richter had dug in 1885. Philipp Kobusch of Kiel was field director, A. Sarris of the University of Cyprus carried out the ground-penetrating radar, and the Amricha Foundation of Leipzig paid for the work³.

Recke worked at Giessen University and later held a curatorial post in the antiquities collection of the Goethe University in Frankfurt^1,2. From 2011 he directed Giessen's excavations at Hala Sultan Tekke jointly with Karin Nys of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, with the aim of publishing a building complex that Paul Åström had found in 1980. The Giessen digs were teaching excavations, and Recke supervised bachelor's theses on Cypriot subjects¹.

After the death of Hans-Günter Buchholz in 2011, Recke and H. Matthäus of Erlangen took over the final publication of Buchholz's German excavations at Tamassos, which ran from 1970 to 1980. Recke prepared a volume on the sanctuaries outside the town, with the finds from Frangissa at its centre¹. In 2012 he published a survey of German excavations in Cyprus and of the German museum collections of Cypriot antiquities¹.

His chapter of 2018 on Ohnefalsch-Richter's Frangissa dig describes work that began on 17 October 1885 and ended on 2 November. Ohnefalsch-Richter was working for Falkland Warren, Chief Secretary and honorary keeper of the Cyprus Museum. No field diary or list of finds survives, and no pottery is known among the objects. Recke argued there that a new excavation could recover discarded sculpture, pottery and the northern part of the site². The 2020 survey followed.