Adventures in Cyprus Part 3

Maa Paleo-Kastro: the most dramatic Bronze Age setting

On the 31st of May, we drove from Polis, where we’re staying on the beach, to a much-debated Bronze Age site called Maa Paleo-Kastro. The site is on a tiny peninsula that sticks out into the blue sea, surrounded on three very rocky sides by water.

Unlike the peaceful Mediterranean beaches here, the waves crash and foam against the jagged stones of this piece of land, hardly more than a splinter in the sea.

A huge defensive fortification with double Cyclopean stone walls filled in between with rubble ran across the side that faces the land. The gateway through these walls requires a person to walk first one way, then turn, then another way. You’d be dead if you were trying to invade and someone was waiting to get you.

Clearly someone wanted to keep others out. This all makes for a beautiful, windy and quite picturesque location. But one does wonder what felt so threatening that such an exposed area was chosen to live on. There are lots and lots of rooms, an extensive set of interior spaces although the archaeological plan claims only 3 separate buildings (it seems more to me…), and at least one big (25 by 30 feet or so) area that looks like a communal courtyard for some of the houses.

Only one of the buildings here is made of ashlar stone (smoothly carved, squared stones). The rest look like the local stone was piled and mortared in place, rubble walls. We know from copper slag and other remains that there was some small-scale metallurgical activity here—Cyprus’s famous copper in financial action again. There are also signs of extensive agricultural storage. Some of those pithoi (clay storage jars) are still lying around in fragmentary form.

The whole site is covered with clay shards and other interesting bits of ancient life, such as a fragment of a quern (used for grinding grain).

It was fun to wander between the rooms and imagine women kneading bread, a metal worker using a bellows to get his copper pit furnace hot enough to melt the ore, and other people carefully storing away olive oil in large clay jars propped on stone holders to stay upright. One interesting detail about copper making on this island: they have discovered a special bent kind of bellows tubing made of clay that would have increased the temperature of the copper furnaces. It’s interesting how an abundance of something useful, like copper, gives rise to the necessary inventions. Humans are an ingenious crew.

The debate, by the way, or one of them, about this site, is whether the inhabitants were “invaders” from the Mycenaean, Aegean world or whether the builders and controllers of this defensive site were native Cypriots, Eteo-Cypriots to use the technical term. We know that around 1200 BCE when this site was first built, that the Mycenaean palaces were suffering various destructions and lots of migrations from the Aegean would make sense. So one theory is that some Aegean Greeks came here, felt like outsiders and built this safety zone for themselves.

But there is a great deal of evidence on this site that these people did things in the Cypriot way—weaving tools, pottery, etc. These people may have admired some Aegean styles of decorating their pots and some other “Mycenaean” details, but I’m less persuaded that this is a “foreign” outpost. Perhaps the fortifications are protection for the agricultural products and other things stored here. This is clearly a world where goods are stored and provided as “pay” for craftsmen and workers doing non-agricultural work, so whoever is responsible for gathering up the food and keeping it at the ready has a great responsibility to make sure no one steals it. This is a time of great disruption elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean and I can believe raids from outside become common at this time. At this point, I’m inclined to see Maa PaleoKastro as a native Cypriot site which does show signs of the outside turmoil, but by keeping out that danger rather than foreigners invading and trying to keep the natives at bay.

Later that day we stopped at a charming Cypriot winery called Sterna. They had a small winery museum with paper mache figures showing the grapes being crushed and the fields being plowed. Both charming and hilarious.

The wine was great. We came away with a large unlabeled, dusty bottle from his cellar.