An unintentional colonial gift: Herbert Horatio Kitchener and the antiquity of the toponymic history of Cyprus
At The National Archives (closest tube station Kew Gardens)
Thursday 17 October 2019, 18:30
You can register to attend this event by following this link
In 1878, a young lieutenant of the Royal Engineers, H.H. Kitchener, arrived in Cyprus. He had been sent to the newly acquired British possession in order to do a quick and rough survey for revenue needs; or at least this is what Sir Garnet Wolseley, the first High Commissioner, had in mind. Instead, working against all odds and certainly against the High Commissioner’s wishes, Kitchener produced an unsurpassed and quite unexpected geospatial and cultural record of the island’s identity.
His Excellency Andreas S. Kakouris, High Commissioner of the Republic of Cyprus, and Dr Ioanna Hadjicosti, Director of the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, will introduce a lecture by Professor Maria Iacovou, of the University of Cyprus, on ‘Herbert Horatio Kitchener and Cyprus: The antiquity of the toponymic history of Cyprus’.
The maps produced by Kitchener will be displayed alongside related documents held by The National Archives.
The lecture will be followed by a wine reception showcasing Cypriot products.
Speaker biography:
Maria Iacovou is Professor of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Archaeology in the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Cyprus (since 2008). She received her PhD from the University of Cincinnati in 1984 and in 1986 she was postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Classical Studies, University College London. Before her election to the University of Cyprus (in 1998), she served for ten years as the Director of the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation (1987-1997), where she was in charge of the development of the Cypriot Collections and especially the Cyprus Map Collection.