For those who are soccer or sports fans, or simply old enough, the name Michel Platini will not be unknown. However, many of our team members did not know the famous soccer player from the 1980s, but that changed quite quickly with a visit to the Platini Museum in Mosfiloti. The visit left us amazed after work as we entered a room plastered all over with Michel Platini’s face, awards, jerseys and similar. With its wealth of objects of about 65,000 pieces, the museum made it into the Guinness Book of Records several times and has certainly been leaving many in a state of disbelief for a few years now. In our case archaeologists, who for a change saw something else in the museum than archaeological objects. As a special highlight, one can also mention the suit that Michel Platini wore in his position as president of UEFA and the teacup and water bottle that Platini drank from during his visit to Cyprus.
After this special curiosity, our excavation week continues as usual, relentlessly moving earth, extracting finds and making more and more effort to even get into the trench as they get deeper and deeper.
At the end of the week we get quite a few visitors, our so-called open excavation day. We get visits from students from the Pankyprion Gymnasium in Nicosia, who are interested in archaeology, from archaeology students from the University of Cyprus and in the evening also from our colleagues from Tamassos. Even though some of the trenches on these days resembled bees’ nests rather than organized trenches, great progress was made and many scientifically valuable finds were made.
Group photo from the day of the open excavation
Our week ended stormily with a more or less sudden thunderstorm, where in a knee-jerk action one of our freshly cleaned sections had to be covered with Geotex as quickly as possible and people threw themselves on top of each other on the edges so that nothing flew away.
But to calm down, fortunately we always have peaceful cats to sweeten the evening.
Tosca Nina Negelmann