Tooulis Svidos

Einar Gjerstad found his chauffeur outside a Nicosia cafe. A few days after Gjerstad reached Cyprus, L. Z. Pierides stopped the car, pointed to a "fat little man" drinking coffee, and said he was "a man who was once honest with me in a situation where anybody else would have been dishonest". Tooulis was hired on the spot¹. He began as chauffeur but, in Gjerstad's words, "mastered twelve other trades and in addition restored antiquities": he rebuilt a statue from many terracotta pieces, an Attic lekythos from small fragments and an Archaic stone statue from ten or twelve pieces, joined with wedged iron rods in drilled holes¹. The first volume of the expedition's publication names "Mr. Tooulis Svidos, Nicosia" as in its service both in Cyprus and in Sweden, "a most skilful mender of pottery and sculptures"². In 1930 he drove the Swedish Crown Prince during his visit and received a tie-pin with the Prince's monogram¹.

The finds reached Stockholm in 1931⁵. Carl-Gustaf Styrenius writes that in the 1930s, when Alfred Westholm directed the Cyprus Collections, "a specialist in this work was Toulis Souidos, who had followed the Expedition from Cyprus and who stayed in Sweden for the rest of his life"³. In the early 1950s Lund students brought by Gjerstad were taught to mend sherds by Tooulis. Lena Söderhjelm calls him "Toulis, Gjerstad's foreman in the excavations, who had become a happy Swedish civil servant, adopting the surname Souidos (the Swede)"⁴. His dates of birth and death are not recorded.