Adventures in Cyprus Part 2

I promised Kition next, but before I jump back to that very important day on the trip, I’ll tell a little about our somewhat lazy day today, May 29. We are both clearing a cold and decided a relaxing day would be smart. We are now in Polis, a small town on the southwestern part of Cyprus. Our hotel is right on the beach, with only a stretch of lawn between us and the sea.

Our major activity today was a tour of the Akamas peninsula via a boat. The water is crystal clear blue.

The Akamas peninsula is mostly a nature preserve now and the few roads in require four-wheel drive. People hike a long way to see the area. Not with a cold, however. The other way to see this dramatic piece of Cyprus is by boat. We went along with a crowd of British and Russian tourists who provided good people watching when we could tear our eyes off the scenery. In contrast to the mostly flat plain leading down to the sea around Larnaca, on the Akamas peninsula there are hills and a dramatic coastline.

Rocks jut out of the water in picturesque ways. This rock is called St George’s Island.

They like St George a lot on Cyprus if the number of his churches and landmarks is any indication. Here’s his church in the tiny village of Maroni that we went to on our second day in Cyprus while searching (successfully!) for some of the more obscure sites on my list.

The Akamas peninsula strikes me as highly atmospheric and a novel-worthy setting. We also had a lovely swim in this blue water and then back onto the boat. Then ate more fresh fish at a harbor taverna before returning to the hotel for a nap.

KITION

Now I’ll backtrack to our visit to the Bronze Age site of Kition, which is a very likely candidate for the new home of my migrating characters. We returned there on Monday when it was indeed open. Here I am standing on the footbridge that goes over the center of the site. You can see the apartment buildings in the back. Bronze Age Kition is mostly buried under modern Larnaca. This portion that has been excavated seems to be comprised of 5 temples and extensive metallurgical workrooms for copper smelting. Only two of the temples are large and somewhat well preserved (by the standards of Bronze Age ruins, anyway) which is to say that you can see the outline of walls and some distinctive features such as a rectangular stone basin that the site refers to as a “sacred lake” but which is probably best understood as a place where sacred water rites would have been performed, about 6’ by 10’ in size and with a pillar jutting into it, although I’m not sure whether the pillar is a later addition. Interesting how important water is to religions. The most squared off block in this photo is the one jutting into the shallow square basin.

Here’s the entryway into Temple 2. A fairly wide road runs in front of the entry cutting horizontally more or less across this photo. On the far left you can see a stone wall 2 or 3 layers high. That is one wall of the temple. Then you see a large upright stone which marks the entryway and then a long lintel stone. (I think I’ve got this right—anyone who knows better, please correct me.)

This kind of smooth, impressive cut stone is called ashlar and is a hallmark of Bronze Age buildings on Cyprus. The idea was to make an impression and show how powerful and wealthy the people who could afford to build these buildings were. Or that’s the theory. There is some dispute about how many of these buildings have a religious function and how much they are purely industrial. I tend to feel that the two are most likely intertwined. Religious elites are often either the same as the political elites or closely allied. Having the copper workshops attached to the temple where the prayers for the success and well being of this financial endeavor are made seems logical for a people who strongly believed in the power of their gods. We have no deciphered written records from Cyprus in this period so I’m making an assumption based on the peoples in nearby areas when I say that the BA Cypriotes believed in the power of their gods, but the Near Eastern and Anatolian evidence would indicate that a strong influence of religious belief in the daily practices of manufacturing and agriculture. Many of the large ashlar buildings we’ve seen appear to be central storage areas for agricultural products like olive oil and grains. Rows of large clay containers called pithoi, or leftover indications of them, have been found in place at several sites. This storage of agriculture means that there is enough surplus so that specialized workers can do their jobs—potters, metal workers, weavers—and still be fed. It means someone has the organizational know how and power to pull off a network spanning large swathes of this island. There’s a great deal of debate about whether there was a single king ruling Cyprus at this time or several chiefdoms. But some person or persons had it together to support a lot of elaborate work in building large scale buildings (but not grand palaces—smaller scale than say the Hittites), fine bronze figures etc, pottery in indigenous styles that show growing influence from the surrounding peoples of the Mycenean lands, the Levant and Anatolia. This was a civilization highly connected with the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean, but nonetheless quite distinctive and in control of its own fate.

Here’s a photo of what remains of the large fortification wall that ran around the city of Kition.

Here’s a close up of some ashlar block walls that have some ships carved into them. You will have a hard time making out the ships. The assumption is that these are a kind of votive offering for safe sailing, carved in by grateful or hopeful sailors. There’s a fat round sort of ship that is probably a merchant ship and a long narrow one that is probably more martial in nature.

The thought that keeps coming back to me as I consider Kition and the Larnaca area as a new home base for some of my Hand of Fire characters is how different this landscape is from what they have grown up with and what a sense of homesickness they will feel if they come here. There are no mountains plunging into sea, no forests on this coastal plain. The soil is almost white from all the limestone in it. I don’t seem to have that quintessential photo—something to work on when we return to Larnaca to catch our plane.