Sophocles Hadjisavvas

Diana Buitron-Oliver, writing on his appointment as Director, reported that he went to the University of Sofia on a Cypriot government fellowship and was the first holder of it who was not from the Communist Party; he took his BA and MA there²⁴. In his second year he began practical training at the Roman garrison site of Novae on the Danube, where he met his future wife, Maria, a first-year student from a family of Bulgarian archaeologists²⁴. He also dug at Nessebar on the Black Sea and at Preslav, and in Cyprus at Idalion with the American team of G. Ernest Wright²⁴.

In 1988 he spent a term at Cambridge studying with Tod Whitelaw, Colin Renfrew and Anthony Snodgrass, and in 1990 he took an MA course at the Institute of Archaeology in London on conservation and exhibition techniques²⁴. In 1992 Gothenburg University awarded him a PhD for a thesis on olive oil processing in Cyprus from the Bronze Age to the Byzantine period, published in the series Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology^24,25.

He later wrote that after the Turkish invasion of 1974 the Department began digging in the free part of Cyprus, above all at Paphos, to fill the gap left by the loss of sites in the occupied north²⁶. His own prime objective, he says, was the scientific investigation of a necropolis that had been at the mercy of treasure hunters for centuries²⁶.

The first season at the Tombs of the Kings, in 1977, cleared twenty tombs, most of them entirely plundered². He directed the second season in 1978³. In 1984, the eighth season, a large funerary complex was completed whose monumental dromos was the longest ever found in Cyprus, and the large tumulus in the south-east of the site was dug in 1984 and 1985^26,27. By the tenth season, in 1986, five funerary complexes and the largest tumulus of the necropolis had been excavated, and major conservation had been done in tombs dug in the first quarter of the twentieth century²⁸. He directed the eleventh season in 1987²⁹. In 1989 the work finished a rock-cut tomb with a dromos of twelve steps, and the fourteenth campaign, in 1990, kept to the north-west end of the central complex, where the large peristyle tombs lie^30,31.

In all, fourteen seasons investigated much of the necropolis, including five monumental hypogea with peristyle atria and one tumulus, some of them partly restored²⁶. He reads the first season as showing Greek burial customs, with groups of tombs inside enclosures (periboloi) as in the Kerameikos at Athens and at Cellarka in the necropolis of Salamis, and he finds the monuments' counterparts mostly in Alexandria and Macedonia, a blend of the two²⁶.

In 1979 levelling at Ayios Georghios in Larnaca revealed a necropolis, where he dug 63 tombs cut in soft clayey rock⁴. In 1980 he directed rescue work at a sanctuary at Kokkines in Strovolos, at an olive press found by chance at Kopetra near Mari during the Nicosia-Limassol road works, and at Ayios Leontios near Akhelia before the new Paphos airport was built, where about 600 square metres revealed a late Roman country house and a medieval building⁵. He explored and sounded the islet of Yeronisos in 1982, and in 1983 a rescue dig at Mavrovouni, near Mathiatis, uncovered a sanctuary under a heap of copper slag with many limestone statues of varied sizes^7,32.

The Kition cemeteries he dug in 1979 and 1984 appeared in two volumes, in 2012 and 2014^33,34. The first presents 63 tombs from Agios Georgios and 22 from Agios Prodromos³³. Nota Kourou's review explains that Agios Georgios was dug during an urgent government project to house people displaced by the 1974 Turkish invasion: the topsoil and tomb markers had gone before the Department was told, so the excavation was hasty, material from looted tombs was collected and intact tombs were properly investigated³³. Kourou praised the book as excellently edited and a significant contribution, and saw its descriptive catalogue as following "the old good way" of the volumes begun by Einar Gjerstad; she faulted some terms for Greek imports, among them an East Greek skyphos called "Black Slip VI"³³.

At Alassa the Department, under him, dug between 1984 and 2000³⁵. The first season, in 1984, fully excavated a Roman villa of the fifth century AD; work at the Late Bronze Age site of Pano Mandilaris, east of the village, continued in 1986^27,28. He began Paliotaverna, north of the old village, in 1991³⁶. In 1992 some 750 square metres were opened there without fully clearing the ashlar building, and the fourth season, in 1994, set out to clear Building II, whose west wall measures 37.30 m by 1.35 m^37,38.

He describes Paliotaverna, at 258 m in the Troodos foothills, as the highest Late Bronze Age settlement of urban character on the island, with a plinth block of nearly 3 tons, a building 37.70 m square and a north wing storeroom holding at least 16 large pithoi³⁹. He compares its drainage with that of the palace of Knossos and takes such buildings as administrative centres for controlling farm produce and, perhaps, copper production³⁹. The final report on both sites appeared in 2017³⁴.

Priscilla Schuster Keswani reports that he places the floor finds at both sites in LC IIIA, while she argues that sherds from its construction suggest a foundation in LC IIC, the late fourteenth to thirteenth century BC³⁵.

Olive oil ran through his work: he excavated several olive presses around the island and reconstructed others²⁴. In August 1990 he excavated the pair of perforated monoliths at Stillarka, south-west of Kouklia, which he had long taken for the uprights of presses; the crushing bed and rollers found there he calls conclusive evidence of an olive press^31,40.

As Curator of Ancient Monuments he worked with the World Bank and the World Heritage Committee on restoring sites, including the reconstructed Neolithic village used as a visitors' centre at Khirokitia²⁴. The Official Gazette records him as Acting Director from 20 October 1997 and Director from 1 February 1998^41,42.

Buitron-Oliver listed his policies: "less excavation, more publication", popular site histories, lectures in schools and travelling exhibitions, the museum archives put online, and a redesigned Report of the Department of Antiquities with peer review²⁴. His chronicle for 1997 gave special weight to conservation and recorded three years of effort on Khirokitia's World Heritage nomination⁴³. By his own account, when part of the Roccas Bastion collapsed after heavy rains in December 2001, he was at the World Heritage Committee in Helsinki and raised it with Mounir Bouchenaki of UNESCO, on whose suggestion the Department wrote to UNESCO's director-general¹⁹. He retired on 1 March 2004⁴⁴.

At a McDonald Institute symposium in Cambridge in 1999 he estimated that more than 60,000 ancient artefacts had been illegally taken abroad since the Turkish invasion of 1974, with perhaps another 16,000 icons and mosaics stolen from churches²¹. In "Perishing Heritage" (2015) he wrote that the destruction of the island's heritage is primarily the result of the military occupation of the north, gave the figure of some 60,000 artefacts sold on the black market, and reported that the Munich Court of Appeal decided on 18 March 2014 to return only 173 of 246 seized objects in the Dikmen case¹⁹.

After retiring he co-founded the THETIS Foundation for the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage of Cyprus and directed it for two years^34,45. He curated Cyprus: Crossroads of Civilizations, held at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History from September 2010 to April 2011^45,46. Since 2007 he has worked as an independent scholar on the final reports of excavations he directed in thirty years of service³⁴. He is a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute, an honorary member of the Athens Archaeological Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London³⁴.