by Judy Powell
In the centre of the old city, the Kumarcilar Khan remained derelict. A seventeenth-century ‘card players’ inn, the building had heavy stone columns and walls that supported a timber roof, now sagging and splintered. For some years Jim had stored his field equipment in the Khan and now, to his fury, he found that much of his equipment was lost and what remained was in a frightful mess. Eve thought this hardly surprising. Obviously Joan had used some of it for Myrtou-Pighades, and what could you expect after nearly ten years? When news of their return spread, old friends arrived and Jim and Eve were touched to be greeted so fondly. Jim had a happy encounter with Michaelaki, a friend from the Cyprus Regiment. Tryphon was put to work cleaning and preparing what equipment they could find, Dikaios lent them tools and hessian sacks for storing finds, and Jim and Tryphon haggled happily over wages. Jim wrote:
My dear Basil this is still the old Cyprus with all its friendliness and courtesy. Strangers are behaving in the old way and none of my village friends have been afraid to seek us out. I only hope nobody will spoil my feelings, for the spell of the island is beginning to come back.22
Detouring on the way home to Tjiklos, they visited Bellapais. It’s tempting to imagine they saw an Englishman sitting under the shading tree at the local café. They would have recognised the world he described although may not have approved of the sentiments. Lawrence Durrell worked as a teacher in Nicosia and knew Peter Megaw. A Greek speaker, he had romantic views of the Mediterranean and his attitudes towards the English expatriate community were acerbic.
The British colony lived what appeared to be a life of blameless monotony, rolling about in small cars, drinking at the yacht club, sailing a bit, going to church, and suffering agonies of apprehension at the thought of not being invited to Government House on the Queen’s Birthday. One saw the murk creeping up over Brixton as one listened to their conversations.23
Jim’s friend Costa was in charge of Bellapais Abbey and persuaded Jim to find money for conservation works that Peter Megaw had approved, but which the Department of Antiquities was unable to fund. Rashly Jim agreed to find the money.
Before leaving Australia, both Eve and Jim had read newspaper reports of ‘terrorist’ agitation against British rule in Cyprus but neither was especially concerned. Letters from old friends remained friendly and Jim for one had no intention of putting himself at risk. ‘I don’t like getting hurt and positively loathe being frightened’, he told Basil. ‘If the tension is too bad, we’ll move on.’24
British Army lorries filled the roads, the only visible army presence as far as either could tell. At Bellapais they were warned that no one knew exactly who was involved in terrorist action and it was as well not to antagonise anyone in the village.25 Jim reported that the locals were prone to throwing stones at the army convoys, but he thought even the English residents would have done the same. If anything, he thought, people seemed united in their antagonism to this military presence.
Jim saw little enmity between Turks and Greeks in the village where they planned to work, although troops had recently been called to quell trouble and they heard rumours that the police feared entering the village. ‘Despite a few threats to kill our people we have had no trouble and I have insisted on employing Greeks and Turks … we are doing our bit to restore sanity’,26 Jim assured Basil. Some political disturbances escaped their notice altogether: on one day in Nicosia, the wireless reported a bombing that neither Jim nor Eve noticed. Certainly bombs were thrown, but Jim thought them primitive and ‘not many people get more than a fright. The Cypriots are more scared than we are. Our Turkish workmen won’t let Eve walk down to the road alone—one of them escorts her. Which is very sweet, but not necessary’.27 When the Post Office in Nicosia was blown up, it interrupted mail deliveries for a while, but nothing in the political situation caused Jim or Eve much concern. ‘It is so easy to commit sabotage and murder here that only Cypriot inefficiency makes life relatively safe. The British are just too incompetent for words in dealing with a very simple situation.’28 Jim blithely assured his father that the recently declared state of emergency would not worry them. And to Basil he commented:
I’m getting bloody cantankerous with the nerves of the Greeks and British. The Greeks are even afraid to go to the cinema. The whole situation is ridiculous, and made worse by the lying newspaper people … The Times correspondent is a Hun, usually drunk, so you can guess his reliability. God castrate the whole bloody lot! We drive around after dark without worry, and the state of emergency has made no difference.
He was shocked to discover that Peter Megaw had five guards at his house and preferred the attitude of their neighbour, the Admiral, who refused guards and wouldn’t even keep his barbed wire in position, ‘but then he’s a Canadian’, Jim added.29
To his father he admitted to shame at the panic the British were in, although he thought the Navy seemed calm and unworried and even went as far as to write a letter to The Times condemning the failure of the British to protect pro-British Cypriots.30 As he told his father, he doubted they would publish the letter, since he ‘advocated the immediate execution of those terrorists who are already under sentence of death. The troops should be allowed to shoot on the spot anyone caught with arms’.31
As soon as possible they drove their small hired Morris to the area they planned to excavate—a site Jim had chosen eighteen years before, a large cemetery like Vounous and, like Vounous, heavily pilfered. Vasilia was situated only fifteen minutes walk from Judith and Andreas Stylianous’s house, and their friends offered the house as a base. Eve and Judith had worked together on the Karpas excavations before the war and Andreas had worked with Jim and Eleanor at Bellapais. Andreas agreed to work at Vasilia, although he had to take time out to drive his young son to school most days and would take time off from excavations when the partridge season began. Eve’s last excavation work had been in England after the war, but Jim had not done any excavations since 1938.
Jim thought the cemetery might be even larger than Vounous and although many of the tombs had been robbed he saw evidence that some had not. He recognised three different tomb types, including one type of rock-cut tomb with no entrance (dromos). This type was named after the site where it was first found, Philia. The Philia period intrigued Jim: was it a precursor to the first phase of the Early Bronze Age or was it, as he suspected, a regional style limited to areas in the northwestern part of Cyprus and coexisting with other developments elsewhere on the island? He and Dikaios could not agree. It was hoped that this excavation would solve the puzzle.
No excavation work could occur without the permission of the Department of Antiquities and the agreement of the landowners. Gregoris Michaeli was the village representative on the Greek Ethnarchy Council and he and Ramadan Ali, one of the Turkish landowners, alternated as night watchmen at the site. Another Turkish landowner, Bayram Riza, was employed to carry excavation equipment and lunch to the site on his donkey. Both Ali and Riza had served with Jim in the Cyprus Regiment; Riza had been captured at Kalamata and Ali was a fellow prisoner of war. Andreas Stylianou worried that employing Turks might give the village a bad name. He was convinced that the village was a hotbed of terrorists and claimed the police from Lapithos were reluctant to go there. Andreas said there were threats to kill anybody who worked for them,32 but Jim stood his ground33 and in the end half the workmen employed on the excavation were fellow prisoners of war. He had few concerns about their loyalty.34
Work began on 17 October, only a week after their arrival. Vasilia was a pretty site, situated on the first set of hills that rose behind the coastal plain, with a higher fir-covered ridge behind, and rising beyond, the twisted rope of the Kyrenia Range. The landscape was a monochrome watercolour world, each layer of wash fading into a softer blue. The site sloped down toward the coastal plain, carob and olive trees falling away in khaki lines toward the sea. Far off, the low coast of Turkey hovered on the horizon. At seven each morning they arrived at the site to begin work. By the m
iddle of the day, even in October, the temperature had risen. After lunch the workmen lay on the ground in the shade of the olive trees, while Jim and Eve sat side by side on a rocky ledge, balancing notepads on their laps to write letters home. They agreed this was a heavenly place.
Digging started in the area with circular, beehive-shaped tholos graves, and quite soon they had excavated down to bare rock. One entranceway looked like it might lead into what they called Tomb 1. Planning and photographing step by step was dull work. Jim moved the men on to more tombs, and although the pace of excavation was fierce he quickly became dispirited. Most of the tombs had been looted in a manner he thought excessive, even for Cyprus.35 A local woman from Vasilia told Eve that when they were minding sheep and goats on the hills they amused themselves by picking up sherds and throwing them through the hole in the roof of one of the tombs, making it next to impossible to be sure that the pottery belonged to the tomb where it had been found.36 The graves were impressive architecturally, but there seemed little prospect of finding whole pots, which both Jim and Eve felt were needed to win over Sydney University and were important if they were to please their financial backers, including the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which had subsidised the dig on the understanding that they receive objects from dated tombs. The museum had no interest in domestic material from habitation areas, which they thought unsuitable for exhibition.37 Hot weather made working in the humid tombs unbearable, and the compacted earth was like cement. Any pots prised from this mortar were unlikely to remain intact, especially given the speed with which they worked with picks and shovels and buckets. Jim spread his workers out, sending Tryphon and Bayram Riza hunting for more tombs and, with long experience, Tryphon found one. Tomb 2 finally produced an almost mint 1890 coin at floor level, which scarcely boded well. And then it rained. Jim’s spirits sank.
By 27 October he had declared Vasilia a ‘washout’.38
Peter Megaw agreed and suggested they try another site. He offered one located between Myrtou and Morphou, from which the Museum had obtained a useful group of pots. He thought it might prove more lucrative. In the end Jim opted for a site suggested by Dikaios, a site more or less within the sprawling city of Nicosia and which Peter Megaw told them would soon be destroyed by building developments. In just a single day they obtained permits from the Department of Antiquities and permission from the landowners, and began work at Ayia Paraskevi. Leaving a group of workmen to finalise work at Vasilia, they took others to this new site thirty miles away, and proceeded to excavate both sites simultaneously, hurtling along the rough dirt roads between each in the tiny Morris. In between times they also excavated a tomb an extra mile away: ‘started at 10.30 am, went through 6 feet of earth and 2 of rock, photographed and drew the burial, and had the pottery out on the roadside by 5 pm, just as darkness fell.’39 It is hardly surprising that the field notes for the work—not published until 1988—were ‘less than ideal’.40
At the last minute Tryphon discovered that Tomb 103 at Vasilia was relatively untouched and phoned Jim urgently. Jim and Eve raced back from Nicosia. Many of the pots in this tomb were, they believed, deliberately broken at the time of burial. This ‘killing’ of an object was common for metal objects but not seen before in pottery. One large pot or pithos was found intact, together with a magnificent alabaster bowl, the earliest discovery yet of alabaster in Cyprus.
Jim sent Basil details of their ‘sensational finds’ but Basil failed to arouse the Sydney Morning Herald’s interest, wryly observing that ‘what excites you and me in matters archaeological leaves the rest of the world out here pretty cold’.41
Vasilia was an important site, even if only a small number of finds were ‘sensational’. At the invitation of a British naval officer, Jim and Eve boarded a mine-layer to view the area from the sea, which prompted Jim to comment:
The obvious importance of Vasilia raises a question. It looks as if Vasilia commanded an excellent harbour for primitive craft, as well as a pass through the Kyrenia mountains, leading by an easy route to the valley of the Ovgos river and thence to the mining district round Lefka. It is possible that Vasilia was one of the main land terminals of a copper route, and that from it the metal was exported by sea. Perhaps it was even the main export centre of the copper trade for the land route to it is easier than around the shoulder of the Troodos range to the South coast. If so, the extent of the cemetery and the wealth of its occupants as shown by the alabasters is easy to understand. Yet the events which led to its abandonment remain lost to history.42
Their last month on Cyprus was spent at the Kumarcilar Khan, cataloguing finds in the drearily bitter damp.43 At Bellapais, where Jim and Eleanor had lived for eighteen months, the Vounous pots had been catalogued in parallel with the excavation. Much of the pottery taken from Ayia Paraskevi and Vasilia, however, would have to dry out in a Cypriot summer before it could be mended. They sorted, drew and catalogued what they could, but most of the work would have to wait another visit.
The weather affected their moods and health. Both Jim and Eve suffered from an allergic rash, although Jim refused to blame ‘Baby’, the stray cat at Tjiklos they had adopted. Apart from one quick visit to Salamis and Enkomi they seldom left the Khan. On 18 December Porphyrios Dikaios arrived for the ‘division of finds’.44 Cyprus kept the one good tomb from Vasilia, containing the large alabaster bowl, and the largest tomb from Ayia Paraskevi. As compensation for the poverty of their finds, Jim and Eve were offered another tomb group, from the Cyprus Museum’s own collection.45
After two months work Jim felt satisfied with this return to Cyprus and to excavations. They had found some beautiful pots and Jim bought more. He even managed to acquire three rare gold bands from Enkomi, which he could prove were found in 1936 and had not been stolen from the French. Dikaios granted export licences and judiciously Jim acquired whatever he could ‘in case the law gets changed in the future’.46
Terence Mitford, the excavator of Kouklia in the south of Cyprus, visited the Stewarts at Tjiklos one night. They chatted long into the night, gossiping about colleagues and teasing out the idea of establishing a foreign institute on Cyprus, along the lines of the British School in Athens or the Institute in Jerusalem. Jim believed that such an institute would not just help visiting scholars, but could play an important political and conciliatory role on the island. Both agreed that the Department of Antiquities had few resources apart from those associated with the conservation of buildings. And the island had no university.
Before he left Cyprus, Jim met informally with Sir Christopher Cox from the Colonial Office to discuss the idea, but he sensed there was little support from officials. Should anything come of it, however, Jim planned to put Basil’s name forward as director. ‘I think you have more tolerance than I do’, he said, tongue in cheek.47
At the beginning of the new year the Stewarts boarded a ship at Limassol. They said only brief goodbyes to friends and family, both expecting to return in a year or two. They sailed to Beirut, where they spent the day with the French archaeologist Maurice Dunand, who had been excavating Byblos for the past thirty years, and then sailed on to Alexandria and finally to Piraeus. A train took them to Athens, where they lunched with Sinclair Hood, Director of the British School. Jim visited a coin dealer and collected a hoard of Medieval Achaean coins that had been recommended to him. Sailing up the Adriatic in blustery weather they sorted coins in the writing room and a week after leaving Limassol landed in Venice. ‘Such a joy to have a bath’, said Eve.48
Jim remembered visiting Venice with his father one summer as a boy of thirteen.49 This time he had to pay the bills, Jim told Basil, but although ‘wickedly expensive’ they decided to lash out and ‘do’ the city. ‘Eve fell for Murano beads, of which we seem to have a supply sufficient for the world’, Jim said, but admitted that he ‘fell for glass animals and laid in a zoo’.50
Weighed down with pots, coins and souvenirs, they boarded the night train for Paris, where they had arranged meetin
gs with colleagues and where Jim was overjoyed to find wine at 2 shillings a pint! They booked into the hotel where Jim had often stayed with his mother.51
The aim of their visit to Paris was to meet with Claude Schaeffer, the grand old man of archaeology. Schaeffer was now fifty-seven. Excavator of Enkomi and Vounous on Cyprus and Ugarit in Syria, Schaeffer had spent four years with the Free French during the war and had lost much of his personal library when the Gestapo occupying his house had burnt his books for heating. When Jim and Eve visited, they heard of the unusual arrangements that applied at Vounous. Apparently the agreement with the Cyprus Department of Antiquities gave Schaeffer half of all the material that Dikaios excavated, and Schaeffer thought this explained why Dikaios no longer worked at the site. At this meeting in Paris, Schaeffer agreed to hand over all his Vounous finds to Jim, who promised that it would be mended and studied at Bathurst. Schaeffer would fly out to see them when work was completed.52 Jim enjoyed the opportunity to thrash out details of little interest to all but a small group of archaeologists, telling Basil that their esoteric discussions ‘remind me of the description of a Highland regiment as kilted gentry preening to each other in Gaelic’.53
Everywhere he went Jim was at pains to report that Australia’s reputation stood high. In Athens he ‘gathered that the Athenian press had played up the alabaster’ and in Paris he decided that the Nicholson compared favourably with the Louvre and the National Archaeological Museum at St Germain-en-Laye. ‘There is no doubt,’ he told Basil, ‘that the Nicholson can be one of the ranking museums’.54