Rudolf Virchow

Two of Max Ohnefalsch-Richter's excavations at Tamassos were paid for by a fund that carried Rudolf Virchow's name. The Cyprus Museum catalogue of 1899 records that graves 1 to 31 of the Lamberti necropolis (1889) and graves 32 to 50 (1894) were dug "for the 'Rudolph Virchow Fund'"¹. The fund, the Rudolf-Virchow-Stiftung, was a foundation, and the 1899 catalogue attributes the money to the fund, not to the man.

Virchow, the Berlin anthropologist who lived from 1821 to 1902², belonged to the Berlin circle behind Max Ohnefalsch-Richter. After the death of Heinrich Schliemann in 1890, Virchow and Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Meiningen were leading members of the network that helped win funding from Wilhelm II in 1893⁵. A lecture Ohnefalsch-Richter gave in Berlin was delivered at Virchow's suggestion⁴, and Ohnefalsch-Richter named him among the contributors to his unpublished Tamassos und Idalion⁶. The 1894 Lamberti finds went to Bonn, Berlin, the Cyprus Museum and Cambridge³.

In 1896 Ohnefalsch-Richter, short of money, wrote to Virchow from London and Berlin about his plan to sell objects at the Berlin Gewerbeausstellung. In July Valentin Weisbach took over his affairs and Virchow was told of it on 6 July. Unsold stock probably passed to Weisbach that year, and Weisbach gave it to the Leipzig Museum für Völkerkunde in December 1898². Recke writes that Weisbach acquired the unsold objects through Virchow's mediation³.

A handwritten note in the Leipzig records says that a lot of 243 objects, the "Gute Collection B", went to the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz with Virchow as intermediary². Buchholz also lists 243 pieces, passed "through Virchow as his Stiftung"⁴. Recke describes a gift of over 240 antiquities from the Virchow-Stiftung in Berlin to the Mainz museum, dated 1898 in his text and 1897 in his catalogue entry³.