Mrs Theodora Z. Pierides

Theodora Pierides is the person credited in print with arranging the Pierides collection at Larnaca as visitors saw it in 1973. She married Zeno D. Pierides and was the mother of Demetrios Z. Pierides¹. In his preface to the 1973 catalogue, Vassos Karageorghis described her as the person "whose love and erudition have contributed to the preservation of the collection during the last thirty years", and as "entirely responsible for its present-day exhibition in five spacious rooms of the Pierides residence in Larnaca"². The collection had been formed by earlier generations of the family, and in 1974 the whole of it was donated to the Pierides Foundation by her son¹.

Her husband died in 1967. The 1968 report records her gift of a large collection of bronze tools and weapons to the Larnaca Museum and calls her the widow of the late Zenon Pierides⁴. A further gift of bronzes, Lca M 757-796, reached the same museum in 1973⁷.

The 1985 catalogue of the Foundation's museum says that she guarded the collection with affection and wisdom through the difficult years after 1974, and that she assisted all who came to study it¹. Einar Gjerstad, writing in 1980, named her as the manager of the Pierides Foundation and said she worked indefatigably for the museum⁸. Her dates of birth and death are not recorded here.