This is a major work, handsomely produced by the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, that is destined to enlighten and divert archaeologists, medievalists, architectural historians, conservationists, biographers, historiographers, and all those researchers who seek to understand the actions and motivations of past generations of contributors to their disciplines. It reveals the daily doings of a singular Englishman (b England 1855; d Nicosia 1935) who spent the greater part of his adult life in the Levant, principally in Cyprus and who, almost single-handedly, against multiple odds, saved from the philistinism of his peers the monuments surviving from the remote and more recent antiquity of that island. If ever there were a candidate for the name of ‘the Wilberforce of national heritage’, it would be George Jeffery, FSA, Curator of Ancient Monuments in Cyprus for most of the period from 1903 to 1935, and unsung hero of the preservation movement in Europe, which gathered momentum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to prevent the obliteration of historical buildings that had weathered the passage of inclement time. Indeed, one of his unforeseen and enduring legacies is the attachment of the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus not to a ministry of culture but to one for infrastructure.

Dr Pilides has assembled an impressive array of documentary evidence chronicling Jeffery’s architectural and conservation work on the island, as well as in Jerusalem. It comprises the daily record of his own activities and correspondence, minutes, newspaper articles and other official documents in Nicosia as well as in London. After five chapters in the first volume devoted to syntheses of Jeffery’s life in Cyprus, his contribution to the restoration and conservation policy of the British Colonial Government from 1900 to 1934, his work as Curator of Ancient Monuments, his role in the affairs and construction of the present Cyprus Museum, and an evaluation of his legacy, his six diaries are then fully transcribed with explanatory footnotes. Volume ii is made up of six voluminous appendices containing selected correspondence from archives in Nicosia and London relating to Jeffery’s appointment as Curator of Ancient Monuments, the protection of ancient monuments in Cyprus from 1903 to 1918, the restoration of ancient monuments by the Curator from 1919 to 1935, the establishment of the Cyprus Museum and its collections and, finally, a compilation of newspaper cuttings referring to Jeffery’s architectural activities in Jerusalem. This compendium is completed by two indexes of place- and personal names, fifty-eight plates and twenty-eight figures, supplemented in the first volume by lists of personnel and toponyms in Cyprus, together with a map of the island.

Together these two volumes give a bird’s-eye view – all the more revealing for being first-hand and unvarnished – of the inner workings of the British administration in Cyprus. While five of the six diaries are really only jottings, they and the rest of the documents transcribed in this book refer in intimate detail to the localities and people involved in Jeffery’s crusade to rescue the ancient monuments and architectural remains in the island from the neglect and indifference of officialdom and the depredations of developers and quarrymen. They therefore represent a fundamental database for the re-writing of many aspects of Cypriote history. Students of the medieval buildings in Famagusta and Nicosia, the abbey at Bellapais, the castles of St Hilarion and Kolossi, and of the Cyprus Museum and Musée Lapidaire in Nicosia will, in particular find valuable new sources of information about their topics of research, and biographers will welcome the large number of personal names recorded, which, in effect, constitute a who’s who of the early days of a developing interest and concern about the tangible legacy of Cyprus’s multifaceted past.

Pilides has organized and annotated the materials in this work with much diligence and care. Every potential source of information, including the Society of Antiquaries, has been thoroughly explored and exploited, and the resulting collation is as complete an introduction to the conservation policies and practices of the British colonial administration in Cyprus as accessible resources permit. Especially valuable is the bibliography in Volume i (pp 377–85), which lists for the first time all the works published by Jeffery. These include several papers that appeared in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries and Archaeologia, as well as popular guide booklets that show his dedication to educating not only the scholarly world but also the local community about the importance of the monuments in Cyprus. He also re-edited and brought up to date in 1929 Claude Delaval Cobham’s pioneering bibliography of Cyprus and evidently possessed an exceptional library of his own, whose fate was mourned in the obituary notice which appeared in the 1935 Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus (p vii). Pilides is able to shed new light on what happened to his collection of books and traces the tortuous course by which Jeffery’s diaries found their way back to the Cyprus Museum, where she discovered them in the library, overlooked and underused.

At a time when the historical monuments of Cyprus remain threatened by the same forces of ‘progress’ as Jeffery confronted a century ago, Pilides, herself a driving force in the Cypriote archaeological establishment, has rendered the public an inestimable service in drawing to our attention what a qualified, committed and energetic individual can do to preserve for posterity what survives to remind us of the past and inspire us in the present.