The Cypriot High Commission opens Cyprus House for a weekend on the island's deep past — Aphrodite's myth on the Saturday, the archaeologists who dig it up on the Sunday.
The Cultural Section of the Cyprus High Commission is the part of the mission that exists to put Cypriot work in front of a British audience, and it does it from the High Commission’s own building rather than by hiring rooms elsewhere. That is unusual among the London diplomatic missions and it changes what the Section can programme: it can give two whole days to one subject without justifying the booking to anybody.
For one weekend in November it gives them to the island’s deep past. The pairing is deliberate. Saturday takes the myth; Sunday takes the fieldwork the myth is built on, and the second day is the more unusual of the two, handing the floor to the excavation foreman rather than to the curator.
Both days are free and both require booking, which is the only barrier, because there is nothing to buy. They are the London weekend of Discovering Ancient Cyprus, a longer programme that continues into December and closes with two days in Oxford in collaboration with the Ashmolean, which was built between 1678 and 1683 around Elias Ashmole’s cabinet of curiosities and is Britain’s first public museum.
Aphrodite's Island: The Goddess of Cyprus and Her Journey Through Antiquity
An afternoon on the archaeology, mythology and long cultural afterlife of Aphrodite, the goddess whose story begins on Cyprus.
It starts at three, with doors at half past two, and falls in the same season as the Ashmolean's Aphrodite — The Making of a Goddess, which opens in Oxford on 8 October and runs to April. Free, with advance booking required.
The Archive of Grigoris Antoniou & SKAMMATA
A morning of film and archaeology built around two projects. Professor Theopisty Stylianou-Lambert presents her work on Grigoris Antoniou, a Cypriot excavation foreman whose contribution to the island's digs went largely unrecorded, followed by a keynote from Dr Thomas Kiely, Curator of the Cyprus Collection at the British Museum.
Danae Stylianou's SKAMMATA screens alongside — an 87-minute documentary produced by the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, following the people and the discoveries behind excavations across the island. Runs 11:00 to 14:45; free, with advance booking essential.