Are you a history buff? If you have my accent (American), history is measured in hundreds of years but here on Cyprus, it’s measured in thousands.
Here is a quick tour of the area right around my house. I don’t live in a special area, like Kyrenia, with castles and Roman columns… just a small, random little village. Cyprus has been continuously inhabited from the late Stone Age. One site has been carbon-dated to between 8800-8600 BC.
It will come as no surprise that during this time a few folks have dropped the occasional plate, even a cup or two has been broken. The result is that the ground is covered in small clay fragments. These little shards are everywhere. Just look down and you will see them.
That deep red/orange color is not natural. Among the thousands of little pebbles you will find these clay fragments. Most are unidentifiable, small round clay pebbles. But keep looking and you will be rewarded: ampere handles are not hard to find. The thick lip of a jar or pot will be located with only a little effort. Want to become an amateur archeologist? Just take a walk.
Of course, finding an ampere handle is nice but how about a castle? Yeah, that’s really a thing in Cyprus. The remains of a fighting castle are located maybe a ten minute walk from my home. Gastria Castle was founded by the Crusaders and later taken over by Richard the Lionheart.
The castle was located on a flat hilltop overlooking the Sea. On the inland side there is now a large open field. I’m told there was a village there and no-one has done archaeological excavations. So just below the plow line, there is a complete, unexplored village. Cyprus is seriously covered in history.
There is no castle standing at the top of the hill now. The stones used for the walls were hauled down the hill and used to make a fish farm enclosure. The men who committed this crime placed the carved faces of the stones towards the dirt, where it cannot easily be seen. Look carefully and you can spot the back side of some of the stones with carved fluting.
Walk in the opposite direction and you’ll come to a spot a friend showed me. Right on the beach there is a packed sand bluff maybe head height. This is a vertical wall of sand and about two feet below the flat surface you’ll find an entire layer of broken clay pieces. But this isn’t like the stuff you find walking around, these are big pieces, half a cup or most of a pot. This was a trash pile. The trash can (rubbish bin) didn’t come into use until almost the turn of the Twentieth Century. If you could not reuse something, it was tossed in a trash heap. These piles are now gold to archeologist.
The shear quantity of history on Cyprus is both a blessing and a curse. In America, the site of Gastria Castle would be a State Park and the site would have been interpreted by professionals long ago. Here, it’s just the place where I used to walk my dog, Mulcheck.
