Love's Obsession by Judy Powell Read Free Book Online

Adolf, gave the expedition royal patronage.
    Between 1927 and 1931 the Swedish Cyprus Expedition excavated, in meticulous detail, important sites across the whole of the island, covering every period from prehistoric to Roman times. The exuberant, youthful energy of its members—archaeologists Einar Gjerstad, Alfirios Westholm, Erik Sjöqvist and the architect John Lindros—was contagious. The expedition brought a wealth of antiquities to the notice of the public and enlarged the collections of the Cyprus Museum. When work was completed, officials loaded 771 packing crates of antiquities at the harbour at Famagusta for shipping to Sweden.
    It is against this background that Peter Megaw arrived in 1936 as the new Director of Antiquities. Born in Dublin and an architect by training, the twenty-six-year-old Megaw was already developing into a Byzantine scholar of distinction and an able administrator. A student of the British School at Athens, he had worked with the brilliant young archaeologist Humphrey Payne in Greece, where he had also met his artist wife, Elektra Mangoletsi. One of his first actions as director was to overhaul the protection of antiquities and ancient monuments in Cyprus.
    He began by moving to regulate the sale and export of antiquities and placed public notices in hotels frequented by foreign tourists.
    Visitors are urgently requested to purchase antiquities only from dealers displaying a license from the Department of Antiquities … To neglect this precaution is directly to encourage illegal excavation, which destroys much archaeological evidence and many objects of interest and value. The public is warned that imitations of antiquities are made and circulate in the island. In case of doubt the Department of Antiquities will gladly give an opinion, but can accept no responsibility. 6
    When tourists complained that it took too long to travel from the port of Famagusta to Nicosia for the necessary export licences, Megaw began to regularly check the stock of licensed traders to identify and approve artefacts for sale and export. He warned tourists against buying material that was not approved, but believed that it was ‘in the interests of the Department to stimulate the trade in antiquities through the authorised channels’. One of the three people who Megaw licensed as an approved antiquities dealer was Petro Colocassides. Eve would come to know him well.
    In the same year that Megaw arrived, William Scorsby Routledge, an Australian, retired to Cyprus. Eve remembered meeting ‘a nice elderly gentleman ’ 7 while sailing to Cyprus with her father. Tom Dray and Routledge became friends, perhaps more. 8 Routledge and his wife Kathleen were explorers and adventurers who had studied the Kikuyu in Kenya and led an expedition to Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, in 1913, sailing there in their purpose-built ninety-foot schooner Mana . It was not a happy voyage and Routledge was a difficult man. One of the expedition members, a young Osbert (O.G.S.) Crawford, who would later found the journal Antiquity and pioneer aerial archaeology, found conditions impossible and jumped ship when they reached the Virgin Islands. 9
    By 1936 Kathleen was dead, Routledge had inherited her considerable wealth, and he was looking for somewhere to retire. Tom left the family home and moved with Routledge into a comfortable three-storeyed house on the outskirts of Kyrenia. While each continued separately to accumulate land and property, they agreed that whoever died first would inherit the other’s estate. 10 Routledge died in 1939 and Tom Dray moved to Tjiklos, a forty-acre property situated on a plateau overlooking Kyrenia.
    Eve’s mother lived at one end of the town and Tom at the other. It was, Eve thought, an amicable separation.
    Joan continued to assume more responsibilities at the museum and was by now an experienced excavator. She had spent four seasons working with Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler