Today, we checked into our hotels in Paphos for our weekend trip. Afterwards, we visited the Kourion Archeological Site, Petra tou Romiou, the Paphos Mosaics, and the Tomb of the Kings.
The Kourion Archeological Site is a beautiful site of an excavated Roman bath house in addition to a Greek amphitheater that was later turned into a Roman arena. The bath house had a handful of mosaics on the floor, and there were the underlying stone foundations of where all the baths were. The amphitheater more well-preserved than the bath house, but still just the bare bones remained. It had the original stairs, in addition to most of the seating that was closest to the stage. We were also able to walk in the original structure of the amphitheater, as opposed to the bath house where there were walkways suspended above the foundations. The one aspect of the site that I found fascinating was that the acoustics of the amphitheater were still in tact. When you were in a square around the focal point of the seating, you could hear a distinct echo of your voice and all other noises seemed to be significantly reduced. It leaves me wondering what the original sound was like in this engineering marvel of antiquity.
Petra tou Romiou, or Aphrodite’s Rock, was another beautiful site steeped in Cyprian history. It is a large rock where Aphrodite was believed to have emerged from the sea foam before being brought to Mount Olympus and made into a major goddess. Supposedly, if you were to swim in the waters around the rock, you could even gain some of her beauty or youth.
The Paphos Mosaics were a set of mosaics discovered to be the original floors of a large hill-top manor. It was initially called the house of Dionysus for it was believed to be a temple for the wine god himself, but it was later discovered to just be the house of a rich wine merchant. All of the mosaics, one even dating back to the 6th century BCE, depicted an element of Greek mythology or geometric designs. Some notable images depicted a sea monster with the top half of a human woman and a bottom half of a scaled tail with five dog heads, Zeus as an eagle abducting a young boy, and a young woman being turned into the first bay leaf tree to escape the god Apollo. The whole set of mosaics was housed in a new structure of wood and glass to preserve the feeling of being inside as well as preserving the mosaics themselves.
Finally, we visited the Tomb of the Kings, an incorrectly named gravesite. Initially believed to be the location of royalty, it was later believed to be a resting place for many common folk. Carved into rocks so as to be monolithic were rooms where holes were dug into the ground and floors to fit either whole bodies or urns of ashes. Many of these such sites would contain 10-30 graves to fit whole families within one tomb. They were created to give the dead a resting place akin to where they would have lived if they were still alive.
Overall, I learned a lot about the Cyprian culture informed by ancient Greece. I also was baffled by the engineering people were able to do centuries ago.
