Petros Kolokasides

In his letters the archaeologist J. R. B. Stewart called Petros Kolokasides both "a crook" and "my general agent for antiquities in Cyprus and the best of the coin dealers"³. Kolokasides was a licensed dealer in Nicosia, and the Cyprus Museum was among his customers. His surname is printed Kolokasides, Kolokassides and Colocassides, and Stewart wrote his first name as Petro. His dates of birth and death are not recorded; he is documented as a dealer from the 1930s to 1986.

Judith Powell reports that A. H. S. Megaw, Director of the Department of Antiquities, issued notices in 1936 urging visitors to buy only from dealers holding a Department licence, and that one of the three people Megaw licensed was "Petro Colocassides"³. When Vassos Karageorghis described him in 1965, he called him "a licenced dealer in Antiquities in Nicosia, and at the same time a collector"¹. Around 1950 Stewart told Basil Hennessy where to find him, at the top of Onasagoras Street, about ten minutes from the Museum, and warned him not to discuss the dealings in front of Museum staff. Hennessy collected gold coins from him for Stewart³.

The earliest dealings Powell records between Stewart and Kolokasides concern coins. At the end of 1946 Stewart sent Eve Dray, then acting as his agent in Cyprus, to the dealer to trace coins from the Paphos (Stavrokono) hoard of Lusignan issues, remarking that Kolokasides had "a lot himself". He gave her fifty-one coins for Stewart³. In 1960 Stewart introduced him to the numismatist Christopher Blunt with the "general agent" description quoted above³.

The same letters hold the accusations. In a later letter to Eve, Stewart told her to work out her plans for the Stavrokono coins "with Petro Colocassides, who is a crook"³. Writing to Blunt in 1960 about a possible hoard of Venetian coins, he thought it probably "the tag end" of the Ledra Street find, which had included a good deal of gold. He had rounded up what he could for the Cyprus Museum in 1955, he said, but feared that Kolokasides "was not particularly honest over the deal", since some of the gold had "found its way into other hands"³. These are Stewart's private opinions as Powell quotes them. No proceedings against the dealer are recorded, and Stewart was himself one of his buyers.

The Cyprus Museum bought from him between 1953 and 1961. In 1953 it acquired a silver ring and two silver-set ring-stones, the ring described as from the collection of George Basil Palma of Famagusta, with no provenance recorded⁴. In 1958 it bought an Attic lekythos by the Deianeira Painter, said to come from a tomb at Polis-Evrethades⁶, and in 1961 a Bichrome amphora with wading birds, said to come from Polis⁶. Both are now in the Marion-Arsinoe museum at Polis.

Stewart's earliest recorded purchase was in 1956: four gold diadems and mouthpieces said to come from the Palma collection, which Stewart attributed to Enkomi⁴. The largest transaction, in 1959, was divided between him and the museum. Kolokasides offered a group of 26 objects, 13 of metal, 11 of pottery and two of stone, all of Philia type, without disclosing where they came from. Stewart believed they came from one looted tomb at Vasilia; the authors of the study that publishes them say the origin cannot be confirmed, while the Philia attribution is secure⁵. Powell adds that Karageorghis negotiated for Stewart over the bronzes in 1959 and 1960³. On 8 December 1959 Stewart took nine metal objects, seven pots and a lid, later in the Museum of Antiquities at the University of New England, Armidale⁵. The Cyprus Museum took four metal items, a chisel, a second perforated-butt axe, a second spearhead and a second armband or ring-ingot, as CM 1959/IV-20/1-4⁵.

The Fogg Museum at Harvard acquired a Late Bronze Age terracotta female figurine from "P. Kolokasides, Nicosia" in 1953⁸. The Friends of the Nicholson Museum in Sydney bought a double-necked vessel of the Early to Middle Cypriot transition, said to come from Yalia, in 1961⁷. Through Jean Des Gagniers, who was digging at Soloi, Université Laval in Quebec bought pieces from him during the 1960s and exported them with the Department's permission⁹.

He kept a collection of his own. Karageorghis published its Mycenaean pottery in 1965 in Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, Cyprus 2. The vases came "from various sources throughout the island" and were mostly ordinary types, apart from a Mycenaean II cup among the earliest imported Mycenaean or Minoan vases found in Cyprus¹. F. H. Stubbings, reviewing the volume, called the collection "slight, but contains one pearl of price"². A Mycenaean-type three-handled jar from it, no. 1606, appears in Graziadio's study of early Aegean-type pottery in Cyprus¹¹, and in his chronicle of the 1973 excavations Karageorghis published a Base Ring II horse-and-rider figurine from the "Collection Kolokassides, Nicosie"¹⁰.

The last sale on record is of medieval pottery. The Friends of the Leventis Municipal Museum had been established in 1986 on the initiative of Constantine Aimiliades, who that summer concluded an agreement with Kolokasides to buy 26 medieval ceramics in four instalments. They were the museum's first medieval ceramics. Its curator, Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel, calls him an art dealer and collector in her foreword to the museum's 2004 catalogue¹³.