Book Review: Cyprus’ Jewel by the Sea

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In Excavating at Salamis in Cyprus, 1952–1974, Cypriot archaeologist Vassos Karageorghis lovingly recalls one of his most memorable excavations—in a part of the island controlled for almost three decades by Turkey.

Salamis. Her wealth profound and glittering, her kings cultured and defiant. A gleaming marble city on the east coast of Cyprus, washed by waves that brought many a hopeful conqueror to her royal court.

Such beguiling images are evoked in Vassos Karageorghis’s archaeological memoir, Excavating at Salamis in Cyprus, 1952–1974. The author’s reputation as the doyen of Cypriot studies is based on his detailed excavation reports, cross-cultural studies and scholarly analyses of Cypriot artifacts. Nowhere, however, is there a volume quite like this one—at once a paean to the heady days of exploring ancient Salamis and a lament that Cyprus’s golden age as an independent, united country was so brief.^a Archaeological texts typically offer facts, measurements and statistics. This one speaks from the heart.

Karageorghis grew up just a few miles from Salamis, in the village of Trikomo, and he traces his fascination with the site to an epiphany that occurred during a high school field trip. While brushing sand from an ancient fallen column, he had intense feelings of 054wonder and awe. Some 13 years later, he returned to the site as an archaeologist.

According to the archaeological evidence, Salamis was first settled in the 11th century B.C. Greek literary sources record that the city was founded after the Trojan War by Teucer, the son of the king of the Greek island of Salamis. For a thousand years, Salamis was the principal city of Cyprus and, indeed, one of the most prosperous cities of the eastern Mediterranean world. From Salamis, merchants sailed to Egypt, the Levant, Anatolia and Greece. The city’s royalty built lavish palaces and tombs. This wealth made Cyprus appealing to invaders, and the island came under Persian jurisdiction in the sixth century B.C. In the late fourth century B.C., Salamis was taken by Ptolemy I, the founder of the Egyptian Ptolemaic Dynasty. By the mid-first century B.C., the Romans controlled Cyprus and incorporated the island into its expanding empire—with its capital not Salamis but Nea Paphos, at the western end of the island.

In the Roman period, Salamis nonetheless remained Cyprus’s richest city, with a magnificent theater, gymnasium and baths, all embellished with beautiful sculptures and mosaics. In 342 A.D. Salamis was renamed Constantia, after the Byzantine emperor Constantius II, and the city became the seat of a metropolitan (the head of an ecclesiastical province). During the Arab raids of 647 and 648, much of the population of Salamis was massacred and the city was sacked—never to recover fully.

Battered by earthquakes, subjected to Arab invasions and inhabited by squatters, Salamis eventually vanished under drifting sand that, mercifully, has preserved much of the site. What remained uncovered tantalized generations of travelers and archaeological voyeurs. Many of these people—both looters and well-intentioned scholars—despoiled parts of the city and the nearby necropolis. Over the centuries, 055the lure of Salamis’s hidden riches proved to be too much of a temptation for those with an appetite for gold and silver jewelry and other precious objects. Ancient treasures were shipped off to foreign museums and private collections.

When Karageorghis was appointed assistant curator of the Cyprus Museum in 1952, he was sent to Salamis to help investigate the area around the ancient gymnasium. The excavation team was faced with a 24-foot-deep accumulation of sand. This tremendous overlay so burdened the laborers that they eventually went on strike; three years would pass before the floor of the gymnasium was uncovered. The team’s discoveries drew curious visitors to the site, but this time the flow of tourists was monitored. They were put in the hands of guides and instructed about the difficulties associated with stratigraphic excavation, which Karageorghis had learned from his teacher, the British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler.

After recovering the columns and statues of the gymnasium, the excavators decided to pursue limited restoration. Using simple equipment and a good deal of ingenuity, the columns were once again raised. Karageorghis describes how the team positioned the marble statues amid budding trees and blooming wild flowers, all set against the brilliant blue sea.

Karageorghis’s discovery of the Roman-period theater in the winter of 1959 was pure serendipity. While searching for mushrooms in the Salamis forest, he noticed a large cavity covered with wild fennel and mimosa. Assuming that the depression might indicate the slope of a theater, he began to excavate the site. The archaeologists soon unearthed the theater’s lower seats, along with the remains of a stage structure replete with honorific inscriptions, statues of the Muses and the radiant marble Apollo Musagetes.

The partially restored theater was inaugurated in 1962 with a production of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. What an opening this must have been! Government officials from the fledgling republic sat beside local villagers, filling the theater to capacity. Makeshift dressing rooms were constructed and electricity was provided by a generator on loan from the army.

One of the great discoveries at Salamis was the necropolis. In 1957, a local farmer cultivating his field happened to find a krater from the Geometric III period (850–750 B.C.), which he brought to the attention of the Cypriot antiquities department. Porphyrios 057Dikaios, then the curator of the Cyprus Museum, began to excavate the site, which turned out to be a tomb. In the dromos (entranceway) of the tomb, the excavators found horse burials. They also found a bronze cauldron with the cremated remains of a woman who was buried with an impressive necklace made of gold and crystal beads. Dikaios had uncovered the first of the so-called Royal Tombs of Salamis, which were built in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. to house the remains of wealthy aristocratic and royal families.

Subsequent excavations by Karageorghis revealed more elaborate burials. In one tomb, human skeletal remains (including one in which the victim’s hands had been tied) disclosed the grisly practice of interring bound captives during funeral rites. The most extraordinary tomb was what came to be called Tomb 79, which Karageorghis considers one of the outstanding discoveries of his career. From May to August 1966, he and his colleagues conducted a painstaking excavation of the tomb. They found a splendid bronze cauldron decorated with sirens and griffins, finely worked ivory plaques, a wooden throne that had been covered with silver plate affixed with gold-headed rivets, the bones of horses, and chariots with bronze trappings. Even the crumbling remains of a chariot’s plaited willow-twig floor remained in a partial state of preservation. As in some Egyptian and Near Eastern burials, the wealthiest citizens of Salamis had their favorite horses and chariots entombed with them.

A few months after work on Tomb 79 was completed, Salamis yielded another marvel. While excavating Tumulus 77 near the village of Enkomi, Karageorghis uncovered the cenotaph of King 058Nicocreon and his family. In 311 B.C. the royal family committed suicide inside their burning palace rather than submit to Ptolemy I, who was besieging Salamis. The excavators found a cenotaph containing many offerings: bronze weapons, droplets of gold from elaborate wreaths, and remnants of clay statues with faces of the royal family. This moving discovery recorded the defiant pride of the last king of Cyprus.

From 1964 to 1974 excavation at Salamis proceeded as a collaborative effort between the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus and a French team from the University of Lyon. Marguerite Yon, who became director of the French mission in 1972, tells about this work in an appendix to Excavating at Salamis. Like Karagheorgis, she affectionately recalls the contributions of local workers from the villages of Enkomi and Ayios Serghios. She also highlights key discoveries made by the French, including an 11th-century B.C. tomb and the early Christian Campanopetra basilica.

After the Turks invaded Cyprus in 1974, all work at Salamis stopped. Although Karageorghis’s book joyfully recounts the thrill of archaeological discovery, its pages are also tinged with a profound longing for what now is just out of reach.

Excavating at Salamis is beautifully illustrated with scores of color and black-and-white photographs that add a vivid sense of immediacy to the excavation records. Books like this one are rare. Seldom does an excavator speak so eloquently and personally about archaeological work, and seldom are we given such an intimate view of an excavation as a shared venture between workers and scholars. This is a precious record of one of the most significant excavations undertaken in Cyprus—or anywhere else in the eastern Mediterranean.

In Excavating at Salamis in Cyprus, 1952–1974, Cypriot archaeologist Vassos Karageorghis lovingly recalls one of his most memorable excavations—in a part of the island controlled for almost three decades by Turkey.