Joaquin Pellegrin-Alvarez
This was intended, in my mind’s eye, to be a blog post about coins on Cyprus, but I couldn’t find much without my institutional access granted to me by Reed College which I have to be on a computer to get, and all the other information online is from weird coin collector websites which is a whole kind of sketchy thing, so I’ve heard. So instead we went to a bunch of museums and archaeological places last week and I can talk about that. That’s also why this is like super late so let’s hope Tom accepts this (n.b., I accept this – Tom).
Our first field trip was to Paphos, which was a really long bus ride (by Cypriot standards, and mine) and it was really hot at the site we went to, where this famous archaeologist showed us around these tombs, some of which had people living in them who were still around, and she was going to coauthor chapters in her book with the people who’d lived there. Then we went closer to actual Paphos, where we visited the Tombs of the Kings, which contrary to the name are not the tombs of any kings but instead a bunch of rich Hellenistic guys (except for maybe one Ptolemy who tried to be king of Cyprus). See Kendall’s Well, Well, Well for pictures of holes there.
After that Paphos we went to the newer Paphos, Nea Paphos. Apparently some line in some old historical text says this new Paphos was founded by the last king of old Paphos, or Palea Paphos, in the 4th-century BCE. Or something like that. But as ancient historians are wont to do with subjects they perhaps did not know all that much about, it’s quite vague and could be taken a few different ways, and now archaeologists can’t find anything 300s BCE about the place, instead putting its foundation some centuries later. But that’s what I remember, apart from the really loud party boat right outside the archaeological site, and Riley has a post on this (see: Protecting Paphos).
Once we got out of the Roman stuff things started becoming a bit more fun at Nea Paphos. We approached some big castle from the Lusignan (i.e. Crusader) period which used a bunch of spolia (which autocorrect seems to think is supposed to be appliances) in its construction. So there’s just a big castle ruin in the middle of this Roman party town. The best part were the tunnels under the castle which I kinda stumbled into but did make sure the Reedies were the last people at the busses when we were supposed to leave. We spent too much time at our various locations so we couldn’t go to see the Aphrodite rock, much to everyone’s disappointment.
Two days later we went on a shorter trip to Nicosia, the capital (apparently Lefkosia is the actual Greek term for the capital, and the crusaders mixed up the letters because they were French). We went to the Cyprus museum there, which was half closed but had lots of cool artifacts, like these funny looking lions which sent me back reeling two semesters in the past to the first half of sophomore year at Reed where a very dramatic image of one of these guys was the picture at the beginning of every slide show in Greek Archaeology with Tom. Sometimes I would walk past the window to the classroom and the lion would be looking at me, ominously. But in person it was much less intimidating. I think my phone died after this so no more pictures but I assure the reader the Cyprus Institute labs were very cool, and that the old town in Nicosia was also cool and we did all get stuck at a restaurant for an hour and had to eat a whole fish, spaghetti, and a salad in a minute or so before running across town back to busses.