Today was our first official day in Cyprus! We went to two historical locations in Limassol Cyprus. The first location was Kourion, an ancient city built by Greeks that originally inhabited the land, but was then taken over by the Romans. We visited two parts of the ancient city the House of Eustolios which was a public bath that the Romans used. It is called the House of Eustolios because he built the house that had the baths in them and then donated it to the town for public use. Our tour guide Demetria was amazing and taught us that when people would come to use the baths they had three options: a cold, a warm, and a hot bath that they could choose to use. Before entering the bath, people would have to wash their feet in a foot bath since their feet were very dirty from walking around all day. In the picture below, a mosaic is shown of the floor and in the back of the photo is one of the baths with a foot bath.

The second location that we visited was the Kolossi Medieval Castle. It was not used for luxury, but as a military castle by the Crusaders. The castle has a draw bridge that could have been pulled up cutting off the steps leading to the castle. The Crusaders when then be located on the second and third levels and would throw anything they had at them including hot oil. The castle also has very high ceilings on the inside and the Crusaders would use large holes they made in the upper ceiling to place wood in and make a second floor for sleeping.

I found the two site we visited very interesting. I also really enjoyed listening to everything our tour guide Demetria informed us about. The thing I found most interesting was about the creation of weighing metals in karats. In ancient times people would discovered that the seeds of the carob tree always weighed the same. They would weigh metals against the seeds to determine how much they weighed. In Roman times they were weighed against a pure gold coin. The coin was always equivalent to 24 seeds. This then created the new measurement for metals known as the karat. Since the pure gold coin was equivalent to 24 seeds the karat was used as a purity measurement. 24 karat is considered pure gold and 12 karat means the alloy contains only 50% gold.