I’ve already written about the Tombs of the Kings and the Pafos Mosaics but we spent a lot of time visiting Roman ruins. Family Frost is not really one for sitting on the beach turning red. We’re not really big on culture either but there doesn’t seem to be much of a third option in Cyprus. The other ruins don’t really merit an entire blog post each but they’re interesting enough for a photoset.
Palaepaphos (Ancient Paphos), Kouklia
Palaepaphos is archaeologically interesting but not so much for your average tourist. It’s the site of a Bronze Age Sanctuary of Aphrodite… but as it’s now at least four thousand years old, there’s not a lot left to see. Ancient Paphos was destroyed by a series of devastating earthquakes somewhere around 400AD, by which point most of the city had moved to its present location anyway. There’s a medieval manor house filled with artifacts from the site and that’s sort of interesting, if you’re into Hellenic and Roman pottery and a single mosaic survives – the original is inside the museum and the one in the remains of the house outside is a reproduction.
Ancient Kourion, Episkopi
This one is genuinely interesting. It’s the remains of a small city perched on a hill above a cliff, with spectacular views of Cyprus’s south coast. There’s a restored ampitheatre overlooking the sea, a huge agora, a house that apparently was once a palace, a few actual houses and a structure called the House of the Gladiators for the mosaics surviving on its floor, which may or may not have once been a training facility. It rained there.
Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates
Five or ten minutes down the road from Ancient Kourion is the remains of the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates, a Cypriot wood-deity later identified with the Greek god Apollo. It’s definitely worth doing Kourion and this one as a pair. The sanctuary consists of a large palace, with about twenty bathing rooms of various temperatures, a long dormitory for priests, novices and visitors, a few houses and at the end, the remains of the temple itself, with two golden columns surviving. Or possibly reconstructed. Either way, those posts stood thousands of years ago and now you can stand beneath them too. It’s not as extensive as Ancient Kourion but what’s there is relatively well preserved.
