Two blogs into my Cyprus series and you may already be getting the idea that we spent a lot of time visiting ruins. I had a guidebook and I read it before we went but somehow I never connected with the words and it took until we were there to realise how many ruins there are and how significant some of them are.
I know most people go to gorgeous Mediterranean islands to bask in the sun. None of us are sun-baskers and my dad is an avowed sea-hater (left to my own devices, I would definitely have gone on a glass-bottomed boat trip, although I probably wouldn’t have actually had a go on a jet ski). So that leaves drinking on the seafront (we’re not big drinkers either) and ruins.
But the Pafos Mosaics are spectacular. I’d spied them in the guidebook over breakfast on Tuesday morning, while we were still figuring out what to do and we shrugged and said “why not?”.
They’re right behind the harbour in Kato Pafos. We’d seen the gate the day before when we stuck our heads into Pafos but hadn’t known what they were. We paid our €4.50 each and went in. The guidebook had said to leave the House of Dionysos until last, to better appreciate the scale and condition of it so first up was the House of Aion.
Well, if this was one of the disappointing houses, I was expecting Dionysos to absolutely blow my mind out. Aion is amazing! It’s got a shed built over the top of it to protect the Roman mosaics and they’re both huge and in amazing condition.
Ok, you can see that it’s far from perfect. There are huge gaps. But it’s two thousand years old. And the guidebook gave me no hint that the mosaics would be so big, so detailed, so colourful, so brilliant. There’s shading! Done in tiny pieces of tiles! When I have my own bathroom big enough, I am so having my floor mosaiced like this.
Next up was the House of Theseus. Given the relative sizes of the Houses of Aion and Theseus, I don’t believe they’re different houses. Or I don’t believe that all of Theseus belongs to the same house. Or something. But I also know that a lot of the Pafos Mosaics remain to be excavated. Given the gaps between places on site, given the size of the agora, which I gather is a marketplace, and the presence of a theatre, this must have been a relatively big city. Hence more than four houses, no matter how big and sprawly the houses were.
The House of Theseus is named after this spectacular mosaic.
There are bits missing again here, but not as many. I find that circular border more interesting than the big picture in the middle personally but again, I can see how extraordinarily detailed the picture is. At least two of the faces were replaced some two centuries after the original mosaic was made and people who know about art or history or both can see that Crete and Ariadne’s faces are a different style. At least, I think it’s those two.
This is what I’m talking about with the scale of the House of Theseus. It can’t all be one house. Further in, you can see the faded remains of frescos on the walls and you can see the hypocaust, which is the underfloor heating that powers the bathing areas. I’ve mostly only taken an interest in roughly 800-1050AD in England and Scandinavia – roughly Alfred the Great to the restored House of Wessex, Cnut the Great, Olafur Tryggvason, Harold Fairhair etc – but now I’m considering taking an interest in this 400-year period two hundred years each side of alleged Jesus.
What also interests me is that these are Roman mosaics. We all know the Romans made mosaics. The Frosts didn’t know that the Romans came out as far as Cyprus, although in hindsight I suppose it’s not that surprising. What surprises me is that the Romans are using traditional Roman art to make pictures of Greek gods and stories. Why am I seeing Zeus instead of Jupiter? Why is there a House of Dionysos rather than Bacchus? I know Cyprus has always had a heavy Greek influence; it’s the Romans rather than Cypriots doing this that bewilders me.
And then you get to the House of Dionysos and you understand.
Again, it’s had a shed-thing built over it to protect it and there are so many mosaics and in such good condition. They’ve built walkways over it so you can walk around the house, you can see where individual rooms are and because there’s a roof over it all, it feels kind of like being inside the House of Dionysos for real. And this isn’t even all of the house. It’s only half of it. The other half is still outside and still half-buried.
This is the one that gives the house its name. Here’s a perfect Dionysos mosaic, again with detail and shading and intricate border. I made a mosaic mirror at Guides once. It has small tiles but it’s still only about 12 x 20 tiles wide and it looks like it was made a by twelve-year-old. That’s more or less what I expected of the Pafos Mosaics and just look at them!
I would have liked to see the odeon and agora but… well, one of our party didn’t want to walk and was prepared to throw a tantrum. “I’m not walking all the way down there”, “the exit is this way!”, “I know I’m right,”, “I want an ice cream” etc. So the odeon and agora only got glimpsed from a distance but look at the size of them! This is why I think the site has to be bigger than four houses.
So, even if you don’t think you have much interest in Roman mosaics, this is definitely worth a couple of hours if you’re in Pafos. It’s genuinely interesting, it’s archaeologically important and significant and it’ll give you interior design goals.