Last major stop for the day is the Archaeological Site of Palaipaphos and the town of Kouklia. We don’t find the actual parking but we find some street parking really close to the entrance and after paying the entrance fee, in we go. Initially there is nothing to see except the castle in the distance but as we continue on the trail we start to make out the outline of ruins in the distance.
We walk towards them and we start to see the outline of temples and walls but we are mostly attracted to the old church visible in the distance. However when we get close to it we notice it is on the other side of the fence, so we leave it for later.
As we explore the ruins we find a wall made of cyclopic stone blocks. They are quite impressive and we wonder how big the wall was and how big the temple. Was it an Aphrodite’s temple as many here where or was it serving another god?
Another attraction here besides the temples are the mosaics so we explore around trying to find them. We find quite a few temples ruins but only a few mosaics.
One of the mosaics is quite beautiful, similar to the other ones we have seen before but the other one is less colorful and we are not even sure if it is ancient or just a placeholder before they replace it.
We then discover a trail that goes along the enclosure, it seems to lead to an enviroment that looks better for birdwatching so we continue on it. Little did we know that it actually led to the location of the Leda and the Swan, the most famous mosaic here. Then we read that it is a reproduction, still cool to see it at the original site.
And we were right, it is a birdier area. We see doves and lots of greenfinches, unfortunately there are no Cyprus Warblers between them.
The views from this stretch of the trail are also quite nice, you can see the sea in the distance as well as the highway that we drove on from Paphos to Larnaca days earlier.
A large part of the park, and one that we were wondering earlier from the outside is occupied by a castle. We know nothing about it so we are curious to learn about it. It is not a castle we learn but a Manor House (with little difference as far as we can tell as from the outside) for the local rulers built by the Lusignan kings in the 13th century. It was the center of local administration directing all the sugar production in the area and it looks quite impressive even today.
It also houses the site museum but before visiting it we first explore the courtyard which itself is an open air museum with finds exhibited almost everwhere.
There is an entrance to a downstairs area that we assume must have been the cellar but possibly is the famous gothic hall, one of the best preserved in Cyprus. We are not sure as there are no signs that we can see telling us any information about the room.
We then watch the short video and use the facilities which have some unexpected signs at the sinks. Is it really such a big problem of people washing their feet that they created a sign and posted it?!
Then it is time for the museum which is split in two rooms. We start with the lower one which has one of the major finds in Cyprus, a stone that is assumed to be the incarnation of the local Goddess and then of Aphrodite and was the attraction of the temple complex nearby. The whole temple complex was well known throughout the Greek world with pilgrims coming to visit it from all over the area. I guess even now there are pilgrims, as we are inside the room a German tourist jumps over the line to hug the rock. She is quite enraptured and continues hugging the stone for quite some time and we are really quite shocked and decide to exit before the guard that makes the rounds outside comes in and maybe assumes we are in the same group.
The second room has artifacts from different eras including the original Leda and the Swan mosaic. The descriptions here are quite interesting so we take our time to go around looking at the objects and trying to understand what they are.
While doing this exploration we keep an eye out for the German tourist, we are afraid she might come in and hug other items too as quite a few of them even here had religious significance.
The other “piece de resistance” of the museum is a limestone coffin surrounded by scenes from Homer’s poems. The informative panels here are quite good as they describe the scene and what they represent and we are taken back to our school days as we were reading old Greek myth stories – we can now link them to the scenes in front of our eyes.
Next it is time to exit and follow the fence to the church we have seen outside. Panagia Odigitria is quite a scenic church built in 1260 and likely linked to the Manor House but somehow it is not part of the archaeological park.
We explore the church grounds and find ancient inscriptions and many many lizards that scurry inside the church for protection.
And it is good protection as the church is not open so after one more look back we go on a short exploration of Kouklia. Interestingly there are quite a few houses here that don’t look maintained, it might be that some of there were the Turk community homes before they were forced to move northward during the war of 1974 while the Greek population was forced southward.
The new church, still older than most in the USA, sits in the center of village square but we cannot enter it either. So we explore the narrow streets a bit more as we approach our car from a different direction and even find the official parking spot and then it is time to continue towards Paphos and our last accomodation in Cyprus.
