6-5-15. Nea Paphos, Cyprus
A five minute walk from my hotel brought me to the Paphos Archaeological Park, where (thanks to an enlightened policy of the Republic of Cyprus) I, as a student, was admitted free. At first glance, the site seemed an unprepossessing jumble of knee-high walls. I soon discovered, however, that these diffident ruins concealed some the finest mosaics in Cyprus. Three grand villas have been uncovered just inside the modern gate, each featuring mosaic floors of impressive quality. My favorite was a circular composition in the so-called House of Theseus, which showed the eponymous hero locked in combat with the Minotaur inside a stylized labyrinth. After the splendor of these mosaics, the scanty ruins of the city center itself were underwhelming.
A walk of nearly two miles along the coast brought me to the necropolis known as the Tombs of the Kings. Although there is no evidence that any kings were buried here, this rocky patch of coast was certainly the resting place of the leading citizens of Hellenistic and Roman Paphos. Inspired by the architecture of their villas and townhouses, they were laid in mausoleums fronted by peristyles and passageways. Many of these silent atriums, carved from living stone, have survived millennia of erosion and looting in superb condition, splendidly evoking the long-vanished houses of the local elite. I spent a very pleasant hour and a half clambering in and around the tombs, cooled by a stiff breeze from the Mediterranean.
Trotting back to the hotel to retrieve my car, I drove to the local archaeological museum (worth every penny of the free admission) and then a further 15 kilometers to the more memorable site of Palaea Paphos. The famous temple of Aphrodite here –the goddess was said to have emerged from the waves at a beach just down the coast –was active for nearly two thousand years. Beginning in the Bronze Age as the center of a local fertility cult, the sanctuary gradually developed associations with the Greek goddess of love and beauty, finally becoming the most important single center of her worship. Despite its significance, the sanctuary was never monumentalized. Even after a rebuilding in the first century, it remained a series of low porticoes, centered on the ancient aniconic symbol of the goddess: an unworked block of basalt. Relatively little remains today; in the Lusignan period, a sugarcane processing facility was built with material plundered from the ruins, effectively stripping the sanctuary to its foundations. When excavations began in the late nineteenth century, relatively little was recovered; among the relatively few artifacts on display in a nearby Lusignan manor, however, is the famous basalt block that symbolized the goddess, found in the rubble of the central courtyard.
After returning to my hotel this evening, I spent an hour walking along the seaside promenade of Kato Paphos, trying to savor my last day on the Mediterranean coast. A perfect sunset merged with the waves as I passed the small Lusignan castle that guards the harbor, and coppery light momentarily hid the mass of vendors along the docks.