Menelaos Markides

On his first visit to the Cyprus Museum, Rupert Forbes Gunnis wrote that its Curator, Menelaos Markides, "really is the father of the whole thing"³. Markides was the first professionally trained Curator. He was born in 1878; Nicholas Stanley-Price, following Despina Pilides, gives his death as 1942, while City of Gold gives 1947^3,4. The place of his birth is not recorded.

Training for the museum

By 1908 Markides held a doctorate in philology and taught at the Pancyprian Gymnasium. He was chosen in that year as curator of the planned new Cyprus Museum and went to Oxford to study archaeology with John Linton Myres before taking up the post⁴. He began work in 1912 as Keeper and Secretary of the Museum and sat on its Museum Committee by virtue of the office³.

Policing the trade

The High Commissioner instructed him to stop illicit excavation. Stanley-Price lists three strategies: excavations by Markides himself and by Myres, lists of private collections (only the Larnaca list was completed), and export permits issued after inspection, fewer than twenty a year³. Myres came at his invitation and worked with him at Lapithos in 1913^3,10.

A later official memorandum, which gives the side of the Famagusta collector George Basil Palma, states that Markides from time to time removed objects from Palma's registered collection for the Museum, authorised Palma to buy objects for it, and was present at the packing in 1927 when Gunnis had the collection seized. Palma refused payment for the objects taken³.

Excavations

Markides opened tombs at Lapithos (Ayia Anastasia and Vrysi tou Barba) in 1914, 1915 and 1917^5,6. He dug at Katydhata in 1915 and 1916, where the Late Cypriot "Tomb of ladies" was found, and is credited with discovering the Arpera site in 1914 and 1915; the Katydhata results were published long afterwards⁷.

At Polis he worked in October and November 1916 and again in May 1918, with the foreman Gregorios Antoniou. The excavation was paid for privately by Charles G. Gunther, owner of the Skouriotissa mine. About sixty tombs were opened, most of them left unpublished, and the work produced the first photographs of tombs at Polis⁴. In 1920 the Inspector of Police at Morphou wrote to Markides about chance finds at Pendayia, near Skouriotissa; the vases recorded in that letter went to the Museum⁸.

Illness and the Swedish expedition

In 1921 Markides had a stroke that left him with a severe speech impediment and limited his work³. Einar Gjerstad, who arrived in Cyprus in October 1923, wrote that Markides had Parkinson's disease by then and that he left Gjerstad his Bronze Age tomb material to study⁵.

From December 1926, according to Stanley-Price's reading of Gunnis's diary, Gunnis re-arranged the collections, had Markides sort boxes that had stood unopened since 1912, and from 1927 sold "duplicates" to tourists³.

In 1930 Markides, Gunnis and Gjerstad formed the committee that worked out how the roughly 18,000 finds of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition were to be divided between the Museum and the excavators; the final proposal was ready on 26 October 1930^5,6.

Retirement

Markides took early retirement, in 1931 according to Stanley-Price and in 1929 according to Thomas Kiely^3,9. Porphyrios Dikaios succeeded him. In May 1932 he attended a meeting of the Museum Committee as a retired honorary member³.