LONDON.- Constantine Leventis, head of a London-based Greek Cypriot business dynasty and a major benefactor of Hellenic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other museums around the world, died on July 11 in London. He was 64. The cause was cancer, said his brother, Tassos. In the late 1970’s Mr. Leventis, who was known as Dino, moved back to London from Nigeria, where he had been running the family’s extensive West African trading interests and began developing businesses in Europe, notably in soft drinks. Last year, he completed the merger of the Hellenic Bottling Company with Coca-Cola Beverages to form the Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company, the second-largest Coca-Cola bottler in the world after the United States bottler, Coca-Cola Enterprises. Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling supplies Eastern Europe, Russia, the Baltic States, Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Greece and Nigeria. A scholarly man with a deep interest in ancient Greece, Mr. Leventis was chairman of the family’s A. G. Leventis Foundation and helped make it a major source of financing for the study, preservation and display of ancient Hellenic and Cypriot art.

In April 2000, the Metropolitan Museum opened the A. G. Leventis Foundation Gallery where the museum’s collection of Cypriot sculpture, terra cottas, vases, jewelry and coins from the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. are displayed. The foundation also helped pay for similar galleries devoted to ancient Greek and Cypriot art in the British Museum, the Louvre in Paris and the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University, among others, according to its latest annual report. In Greece, it has financed extensive archeological work. It is currently re-erecting one of the columns in the Temple of Zeus at Olympia and restoring icons and other treasures at a monastery on Mount Athos. The foundation has restored Byzantine churches in Cyprus, Greece and Bulgaria and runs agricultural schools in Ghana and Nigeria.

Born at Larnaca, in Cyprus, April 19, 1938, Mr. Leventis was educated in Britain at Harrow and Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied classics. Like other members of the family, he began his career working in various departments of the family’s trading business in Ghana and Nigeria, where the Leventises run stores and supermarkets and have major importing and exporting interests. In Nigeria, he became chief executive of Leventis Motors, the country’s biggest vehicle importer, and negotiated a deal with Daimler-Benz under which the company assembled Mercedes trucks for the whole West African market. He later moved to London to oversee the family group’s expansion.