Socrates Stylianou

Socrates Stylianou of Episkopi helped to empty Kaloriziki Tomb 40 in 1903 and, about fifty years later, told George H. McFadden where it was. McFadden names the three men as Socrates Stylianou and Markos Elevtheriou, both of Episkopi, and Mavrosavvas, originally from Larnaca. The tomb lay southwest of Episkopi, about 300 m east of the small Byzantine church of Ayios Ermoyenis¹. They disposed of some finds locally and took the rest to the Larnaca house of Mavrosavvas's friend Constantinos Grammenopoulos, where, McFadden writes, the police caught them and confiscated two bronze tripods, the rim and handles of a bronze vase, and a gold and enamel sceptre, now in the Cyprus Museum¹. McFadden says this was at the house and not, as had recently been supposed, in the Customs House; Michael Given writes that the finds then waited ten years in the Customs House².

McFadden examined the sceptre in Nicosia and wondered whether the tomb could be found. Among the old men of Episkopi, "Conspicuous among them was Socrates, the sole survivor", who was "quite an old man, very ill with heart trouble and quite unable to leave his house". He said the tomb lay on the scarp between a fig tree and a carob with three trunks, near a wild hawthorn; that it was shallow, with no dromos; and that it had been sifted twice¹. The University of Pennsylvania's Curium Expedition began at Kaloriziki on 31 March 1952. The carob, the fig and the hawthorn roots were where he had put them, and the trench opened a tomb that matched his account, except for a rock-hewn bench that the robbers had taken for the south wall, so that the finds on the bench survived¹. Given reads the episode as a named local contributor appearing in the record of an excavation². His dates of birth and death are not known.

Pressed later, Socrates said the sceptre had lain under the bronze urn, covered by a strainer. McFadden found a cremation urn with a strainer, and noted that the sceptre may once have lain inside it¹.