Wiktor Andrzej Daszewski

Wiktor Andrzej Daszewski stood in for Kazimierz Michałowski at Nea Paphos in 1966 and directed the Polish mission there until 2007^2,7. He was born on 1 November 1936 at Horodislavichi and died in Warsaw on 17 January 2021; he taught at the University of Warsaw and, according to the German national authority record, served as Secretary General of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology's station in Cairo¹.

The Polish mission at Nea Paphos began in 1965 under Michałowski^6,7. Daszewski's name enters Vassos Karageorghis's annual chronicle of excavations in Cyprus for 1967, which records that the May and June campaigns of 1966 and 1967 at Maloutena were directed by Michałowski and, in his absence, by Daszewski². The chronicle for 1968 again has Daszewski leading the work while Michałowski was away³. The same 1967 chronicle reports marble statues of Asklepios and Artemis from the sounding trenches of 1965².

By 1973 the excavation appears in the chronicle as the work of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, Cairo, under Daszewski's direction. Its ninth campaign ran from 17 September to 17 November and exposed the baths of the palace⁴. Maier and Karageorghis, in their 1984 history of Paphos, write that the Polish excavations were by then under the direction of W. A. Daszewski, and they cite his Nea Paphos II, published in 1977, on the mosaic of Theseus and the labyrinth^6,9. The House or Villa of Theseus was excavated further in 1977 and 1978⁶. In 1984 he put his name to the mission's report on the Maloutena sector in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus, together with B. Lichocka, Jolanta Młynarczyk and Z. Sztetyłło¹³. A photograph from 1973 shows him and Sztetyłło with the statue of the armed Venus⁷.

The House of Aion produced a group of mosaics that Daszewski published early. Anne Hermary's chronicle of Cypriot archaeology for 1984 and 1985 describes the ensemble with Leda, the birth of Dionysos, Cassiopeia and a Dionysiac procession, and says Daszewski had presented it first in Dionysos der Erlöser: Griechische Mythen im spätantiken Zypern (1985)^5,10. That year he also contributed "Researches at Nea Paphos 1965-1984" to Archaeology in Cyprus 1960-1985, edited by Karageorghis¹¹. In 1988 he edited Mosaic Floors in Cyprus with Demetrios Michaelides and wrote its chapter on the figural mosaics of Paphos^7,12.

In 1987 a team from the University of Trier under Günter Grimm dug at the theatre of Nea Paphos in cooperation with Daszewski's mission, for a single campaign⁸. Ewdoksia Papuci-Władyka worked with the mission from 1984 and under him until 2007, when Henryk Meyza succeeded him⁷. A volume of studies in his honour for his seventy-fifth birthday, Classica Orientalia, edited by Meyza and Zych, appeared in 2011⁷.