He was born in the village of Palaikythro, his father was a priest Papa-Georgios Athanasiou and his mom Chrystallou Papanastasiou.
After the end of the struggle in 1959 and the creation of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960 he went to Paris for graduate studies on Byzantine history and art.
[1][2] In 1962 he became Curator of Monuments,[3] and in 1989 director of the Department of Antiquities, succeeding Vassos Karageorghis, until his retirement in 1991.
[4] He excavated a number of sites such as the basilicas of Marathovouno, Agia Triada in Gialousa and the Limeniotissa and Agia Kyriaki in Paphos, and contributed greatly to the study of Cypriot ecclesiastical architecture of the Late Antique and Byzantine periods.
Additionally he worked extensively on the religious paintings in Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean during the Middle Byzantine and Frankish periods and to repatriate Byzantine art that was illegally exported from Cyprus after the Turkish Invasion of 1974.