FEAR AND LOATHING:
AN AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGIST'S MYSTERIOUS LOCAL DEATH
In a new book about American archaeologist George H. McFadden, author Richard Carreño explores McFadden’s the life in Episkopi, Cyprus as a famed digger at Kourion and, later, his still largely unexplained death at sea in 1953. Carreño, a writer from the United States, explores McFadden’s many faceted life as an accomplished archaeologist, a World War II American spy in Cyprus, a poet, and scholar and the intrigue that led to his possibly nefarious death in The Inventive Life of George H. McFadden: Archaeologist, Poet, Scholar, Spy, soon to be published by Camino Books, Philadelphia, USA. The book will be available in major local bookshops, where English-language books are available.
An excerpt, adapted from the book, follows:
GEORGE H. McFADDEN was the scion of one of the twentieth century’s richest and most prominent Philadelphia families. His abbreviated life, cut short by drowning when he was nearly forty-six years old, was crammed with adventure, scholarship, and service to country. He was a reluctant cotton broker; an accomplished poet; a scholar of ancient Greece and Rome; a student of German literature; a translator of ancient Greek texts; an operative for the US wartime spy service, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS); and for many years an archaeologist with the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. He was a devotée of Greek national life—an unabashed philhellene—and a founder and financier of Penn’s extensive archaeological project at Kourion in southwest Cyprus.
Despite a life salted with daring, enterprise, and intrigue—the stuff of high drama—McFadden bore a weight of inescapable melancholy. He was estranged from his parents. His siblings were remote. He never married. Personal relationships were founded more by association than friendship. They were often marred by conflict; seldom, to his chagrin, by mutual respect. He was close to only a few. He closeted his homosexuality, knowing its disclosure would have resulted in professional and social ruin.
McFadden died in 1953, in a sailing mishap off the southern coast of Cyprus, not far from Penn’s pioneering—and McFadden’s beloved—excavation of Kourion, a celebrated site in Greek and Roman history. How he met his end has never been fully resolved; his death being the subject of lingering controversy. Though few remember the circumstances of his ambiguous demise, details remain decades later shrouded in suspicion and mystery. Some to this day believe McFadden was murdered by a British spy. Despite McFadden’s infectious brio and often capricious derring-do, Cyprus by the time of his death had soured for him, becoming “an island of bitter lemons.”
GEORGE McFADDEN WAS not a professional archaeologist, the kind of classically trained academic usually deployed to faraway lands by learned institutions. He found his scholarly strength in English literature, always earning high marks at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania. His career as a digger—and master amateur of archaeology—came later.
McFadden’s life was circumscribed by geographical boundaries he imposed upon himself. Cyprus, while not his native land, became his homeland. He was cocooned in a drama shrunk to a cast of few players. Intersecting his world at work and at war were less than a dozen principals. His life drama contained moments of farce, with real-life players never far from departing from one slamming door, entering another, or figuring in bit scenes as “noises off.”
McFadden's inner world was conflicted. His homosexuality was an open secret, possibility contributing to bouts of moodiness and depression. McFadden found himself in the depths of that fissure.
In a new book (Camino Books/2024) about American archaeologist George H. McFadden, author Richard Carreño explores McFadden’s the life in Episkopi, Cyprus as a famed digger at Kourion and, later, his still largely unexplained death at sea in 1953. Carreño, a writer from the United States, explores McFadden’s many faceted life as an accomplished archeologist, a World War II American spy in Cyprus, a poet, and scholar and the intrigue that led to his possibly nefarious death in The Inventive Life of George H. McFadden: Archaeologist, Poet, Scholar, Spy, soon to be published by Camino Books, Philadelphia, USA. The book will be available in major local bookshops, where English-language books are available.
An excerpt, adapted from the book, follows:
GEORGE H. McFADDEN was the scion of one of the twentieth century’s richest and most prominent Philadelphia families. His abbreviated life, cut short by drowning when he was nearly forty-six years old, was crammed with adventure, scholarship, and service to country. He was a reluctant cotton broker; an accomplished poet; a scholar of ancient Greece and Rome; a student of German literature; a translator of ancient Greek texts; an operative for the US wartime spy service, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS); and for many years an archaeologist with the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. He was a devotée of Greek national life—an unabashed philhellene—and a founder and financier of Penn’s extensive archaeological project at Kourion in southwest Cyprus.
Despite a life salted with daring, enterprise, and intrigue—the stuff of high drama—McFadden bore a weight of inescapable melancholy. He was estranged from his parents. His siblings were remote. He never married. Personal relationships were founded more by association than friendship. They were often marred by conflict; seldom, to his chagrin, by mutual respect. He was close to only a few. He closeted his homosexuality, knowing its disclosure would have resulted in professional and social ruin.
McFadden died in 1953, in a sailing mishap off the southern coast of Cyprus, not far from Penn’s pioneering—and McFadden’s beloved—excavation of Kourion, a celebrated site in Greek and Roman history. How he met his end has never been fully resolved; his death being the subject of lingering controversy. Though few remember the circumstances of his ambiguous demise, details remain decades later shrouded in suspicion and mystery. Some to this day believe McFadden was murdered by a British spy. Despite McFadden’s infectious brio and often capricious derring-do, Cyprus by the time of his death had soured for him, becoming “an island of bitter lemons.”
GEORGE McFADDEN WAS not a professional archaeologist, the kind of classically trained academic usually deployed to faraway lands by learned institutions. He found his scholarly strength in English literature, always earning high marks at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania. His career as a digger—and master amateur of archaeology—came later.
McFadden’s life was circumscribed by geographical boundaries he imposed upon himself. Cyprus, while not his native land, became his homeland. He was cocooned in a drama shrunk to a cast of few players. Intersecting his world at work and at war were less than a dozen principals. His life drama contained moments of farce, with real-life players never far from departing from one slamming door, entering another, or figuring in bit scenes as “noises off.”
McFadden's inner world was conflicted. His homosexuality was an open secret, possibility contributing to bouts of moodiness and depression. McFadden found himself in the depths of that fissure, whipsawed by war, outsized ambition, and the vagaries of his unsettled life. His attempts to be his own rule-maker, brandishing a cavalier lèse-majesté, often led to his downfall.
Going his way isolated him, and critics abounded. One of his severest detractors was archaeologist David Soren, who followed George, quite literally, in the trenches his predecessor had dug years before at Kourion. “He was not a great, or even a good archaeologist,” Soren summed up. Still, he praised George for unearthing “a large number,” “a huge number,” indeed “hundreds” of treasures—and the “first” ritual horticultural site at the excavation.
The concatenation of McFadden’s topsy-turvy life was part opéra bouffe—and almost always wholly of McFadden's own making. As was, possibility, his own death.
IN THE EARLY evening of April 19, 1953, a Sunday, McFadden boarded a twelve-foot sailboat, setting forth from the southeastern coast of Cyprus. A casual observer might have looked askance at the twilight hour, an uncommon time to embark on a pleasure outing; and at the nautical limitations of his recreational craft. His hollow core flat-bed-designed and branded “Sail Fish” was really like a larger version of a surfboard with a sail. More ominously, the authorities had declared sailing conditions perilous. Seas were later remembered to be “choppy,” “heavy,” “rough,” “unsuitable,” and “liable to carry a light craft out to sea.
Almost immediately, McFadden began struggling to keep the sailboat righted. Sometime later, out of sight of those on land, he slipped off the deck, and was, by all appearances, swallowed in the turbulent water.
McFadden died just two days short of his forty-sixth birthday.
FOR ALMOST TWENTY years from 1934, George McFadden had represented the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology as one of its most seasoned archaeologists on the then-British-controlled island. McFadden's pride was in uncovering the ruins at ancient city-state of Kourion, a time capsule of early Greek and Roman civilizations and one of the Mediterranean's most celebrated archaeological sites. McFadden called the place Curium, as did the Romans (58 BCE–395 CE). Earlier Greek settlers (475–58 BCE) had dubbed their hillside city Kourion. It was this latter name that stuck, and it has become common parlance.
Cyprus, about the size of the American state of Delaware and, in the 1950s, with a population of about 600,000, was a very troubled place. A divisive ethnic hostility between minority Cypriot Turks, predominantly in the north and Cypriot Greeks in the south, simmered as British colonial authorities tried to keep the peace between the fractious parties. Unsuccessfully.
The turmoil in the years after World War II turned personal: McFadden saw the Royal Air Force airfield nearby at Akrotiri, British sovereign territory to this day, as a threat to the Kourion excavations.
McFadden knew his way around the island, on land and at sea, and was never known to recklessly risk his personal safety. He was an experienced mariner of more than twenty years standing and was used to taming all sorts of watercraft. Some Episkopi villagers even thought him so able they honored him as a “Thalassolykos”— a “Sea Wolf.”
MISSING PIECES THAT would allow full comprehension of McFadden's death have lingered unresolved. David Soren, the archaeologist who excavated at Kourion in the 1980s, wrote about an unsettling inconsistency. The “boating accident” was “never explained,” other than described as “tragic” and “mysterious.”
These undisclosed details about McFadden’s misadventure led me to Cyprus, and on a sunny day to an opulent office in Nicosia, the capital, where I had hoped to unlock the conundrum. The setting was redolent of a drawing-room mystery: an overstuffed, book-lined Victorian-era bureau in the Cyprus Museum, a brick-and-mortar cultural legacy of British rule. The nineteenth-century institution is located near Nicosia's Old City, where some of the narrow, run-down back streets still exude a menacing frisson of danger. The museum's “new” building, from 1908, looks like someone's bright idea of a miniaturized British Museum, accenting a throwback English-Colonial atmosphere.
I was meeting with Dr. Despina Pilides, the Cyprus Museum's curator, and Apasia Soula Georgidou, an archaeological researcher at the Department of Antiquities. Georgidou had earlier told me that my inquiries had prompted a former director of the antiquities department, Dr. Vassos Karageorghis, to flag a relevant file, long ago consigned to presumed oblivion in a government depository known as the Archive Section of the Republic of Cyprus.
The following day, to Dr. Pilides’s surprise and mine, she was able to promptly retrieve the folder. There it was now before me, stuffed with newspaper clippings in English and in Greek—along with, most tantalizing, a deposition taken by the police. The folder's file name was “George McFadden, lost at sea.”
Pilides told me the fragility of the five-page document—on onionskin, foolscap-sized paper—precluded photocopies. However, she said, I was free to read and photograph the “statement,” as police had designated it.
SOON AFTER I looked over the Bay of Episkopi, an expanse of blue water where the Akrotiri Peninsula juts into the Mediterranean and where, off this same desolate beach, McFadden had perished—seventy years before. In the scheme of things, of course, McFadden's drowning bore the markings of innumerable similar occurrences. Man overboard, lost at sea. But his misadventure also entailed some uncharacteristic incongruities and peculiarities. Had McFadden died in a woe-begotten accident, or, as many believed, had he been murdered?
An eyewitness to the unfolding event, Christophis Polycarpou, described the fateful scene. Polycarpou was a draftsman on the McFadden Kourion team, and he had been watching his boss from the water's edge. From the beginning McFadden was seen to be struggling with an uncooperative boat. “It became clear to his friends on shore that [McFadden] was in trouble” and needed assistance, Polycarpou said.12
The ensuing rescue attempt seems bizarre and almost risible, if it were not for its deadly conclusion. From an outward appearance, a strong swimmer equipped with a lifebuoy might have been able to reach McFadden—especially since water depth was believed to be still shallow. Instead, the rescue was undertaken by commandeering a nearby boat, though that effort was quickly aborted. The vessel's drain plug had been removed, and no one had noticed. Full of water, the boat was useless.
Next, Polycarpou set out by car to find another rescue vessel in Limassol, a coastal city about fifteen kilometers to the east. He found a captain he knew, acquired a boat, and a search followed. Though now hindered by nightfall, Polycarpou and the conscripted captain were undeterred, searching the shoreline of Episkopi Bay through the night. An additional eight men were recruited to scour the area.
At daylight the following day, Monday, police launches, fishing trawlers, and a Royal Air Force squadron, including fighter jets, were enlisted in the search. An RAF twin-prop Anson trainer was deployed. American consular officials procured an amphibious plane. Even an ocean liner, the Messapia, “diverted its course for the purpose.”
After two days, everyone went home.
McFadden's unmanned sailboat turned up the next day.
Twelve days later, McFadden's body washed up on shore near Cape Pyla, the site of another problematic airfield, the RAF’s Sovereign Base Area Dhekelia. His body had undertaken a remarkable—and, to some, a seemingly improbable—journey of more than one hundred kilometers to the east. ambition, and the vagaries of his unsettled life. His attempts to be his own rule-maker, brandishing a cavalier lèse-majesté, often led to his downfall.
Going his way isolated him, and critics abounded. One of his severest detractors was archaeologist David Soren, who followed George, quite literally, in the trenches his predecessor had dug years before at Kourion. “He was not a great, or even a good archaeologist,” Soren summed up. Still, he praised George for unearthing “a large number,” “a huge number,” indeed “hundreds” of treasures—and the “first” ritual horticultural site at the excavation.
The concatenation of McFadden’s topsy-turvy life was part opéra bouffe—and almost always wholly of McFadden's own making. As was, possibility, his own death.
IN THE EARLY evening of April 19, 1953, a Sunday, McFadden boarded a twelve-foot sailboat, setting forth from the southeastern coast of Cyprus. A casual observer might have looked askance at the twilight hour, an uncommon time to embark on a pleasure outing; and at the nautical limitations of his recreational craft. His hollow core flat-bed-designed and branded “Sail Fish” was really like a larger version of a surfboard with a sail. More ominously, the authorities had declared sailing conditions perilous. Seas were later remembered to be “choppy,” “heavy,” “rough,” “unsuitable,” and “liable to carry a light craft out to sea.
Almost immediately, McFadden began struggling to keep the sailboat righted. Sometime later, out of sight of those on land, he slipped off the deck, and was, by all appearances, swallowed in the turbulent water.
McFadden died just two days short of his forty-sixth birthday.
FOR ALMOST TWENTY years from 1934, George McFadden had represented the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology as one of its most seasoned archaeologists on the then-British-controlled island. McFadden's pride was in uncovering the ruins at ancient city-state of Kourion, a time capsule of early Greek and Roman civilizations and one of the Mediterranean's most celebrated archaeological sites. McFadden called the place Curium, as did the Romans (58 BCE–395 CE). Earlier Greek settlers (475–58 BCE) had dubbed their hillside city Kourion. It was this latter name that stuck, and it has become common parlance.
Cyprus, about the size of the American state of Delaware and, in the 1950s, with a population of about 600,000, was a very troubled place. A divisive ethnic hostility between minority Cypriot Turks, predominantly in the north and Cypriot Greeks in the south, simmered as British colonial authorities tried to keep the peace between the fractious parties. Unsuccessfully.
The turmoil in the years after World War II turned personal: McFadden saw the Royal Air Force airfield nearby at Akrotiri, British sovereign territory to this day, as a threat to the Kourion excavations.
McFadden knew his way around the island, on land and at sea, and was never known to recklessly risk his personal safety. He was an experienced mariner of more than twenty years standing and was used to taming all sorts of watercraft. Some Episkopi villagers even thought him so able they honored him as a “Thalassolykos”— a “Sea Wolf.”
MISSING PIECES THAT would allow full comprehension of McFadden's death have lingered unresolved. David Soren, the archaeologist who excavated at Kourion in the 1980s, wrote about an unsettling inconsistency. The “boating accident” was “never explained,” other than described as “tragic” and “mysterious.”
These undisclosed details about McFadden’s misadventure led me to Cyprus, and on a sunny day to an opulent office in Nicosia, the capital, where I had hoped to unlock the conundrum. The setting was redolent of a drawing-room mystery: an overstuffed, book-lined Victorian-era bureau in the Cyprus Museum, a brick-and-mortar cultural legacy of British rule. The nineteenth-century institution is located near Nicosia's Old City, where some of the narrow, run-down back streets still exude a menacing frisson of danger. The museum's “new” building, from 1908, looks like someone's bright idea of a miniaturized British Museum, accenting a throwback English-Colonial atmosphere.
I was meeting with Dr. Despina Pilides, the Cyprus Museum's curator, and Apasia Soula Georgidou, an archaeological researcher at the Department of Antiquities. Georgidou had earlier told me that my inquiries had prompted a former director of the antiquities department, Dr. Vassos Karageorghis, to flag a relevant file, long ago consigned to presumed oblivion in a government depository known as the Archive Section of the Republic of Cyprus.
The following day, to Dr. Pilides’s surprise and mine, she was able to promptly retrieve the folder. There it was now before me, stuffed with newspaper clippings in English and in Greek—along with, most tantalizing, a deposition taken by the police. The folder's file name was “George McFadden, lost at sea.”
Pilides told me the fragility of the five-page document—on onionskin, foolscap-sized paper—precluded photocopies. However, she said, I was free to read and photograph the “statement,” as police had designated it.
SOON AFTER I looked over the Bay of Episkopi, an expanse of blue water where the Akrotiri Peninsula juts into the Mediterranean and where, off this same desolate beach, McFadden had perished—seventy years before. In the scheme of things, of course, McFadden's drowning bore the markings of innumerable similar occurrences. Man overboard, lost at sea. But his misadventure also entailed some uncharacteristic incongruities and peculiarities. Had McFadden died in a woe-begotten accident, or, as many believed, had he been murdered?
An eyewitness to the unfolding event, Christophis Polycarpou, described the fateful scene. Polycarpou was a draftsman on the McFadden Kourion team, and he had been watching his boss from the water's edge. From the beginning McFadden was seen to be struggling with an uncooperative boat. “It became clear to his friends on shore that [McFadden] was in trouble” and needed assistance, Polycarpou said.
The ensuing rescue attempt seems bizarre and almost risible, if it were not for its deadly conclusion. From an outward appearance, a strong swimmer equipped with a lifebuoy might have been able to reach McFadden—especially since water depth was believed to be still shallow. Instead, the rescue was undertaken by commandeering a nearby boat, though that effort was quickly aborted. The vessel's drain plug had been removed, and no one had noticed. Full of water, the boat was useless.
Next, Polycarpou set out by car to find another rescue vessel in Limassol, a coastal city about fifteen kilometers to the east. He found a captain he knew, acquired a boat, and a search followed. Though now hindered by nightfall, Polycarpou and the conscripted captain were undeterred, searching the shoreline of Episkopi Bay through the night. An additional eight men were recruited to scour the area.
At daylight the following day, Monday, police launches, fishing trawlers, and a Royal Air Force squadron, including fighter jets, were enlisted in the search. A RAF twin-prop Anson trainer was deployed. American consular officials procured an amphibious plane. Even an ocean liner, the Messapia, “diverted its course for the purpose.”
After two days, everyone went home.
McFadden's unmanned sailboat turned up the next day.
Twelve days later, McFadden's body washed up on shore near Cape Pyla, the site of another problematic airfield, the RAF’s Sovereign Base Area Dhekelia. His body had undertaken a remarkable—and, to some, a seemingly improbable—journey of more than one hundred kilometers to the east.
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