Series·Swedish Cyprus Expedition

Vouni palace, rooms 1–65

124 field photographs · 1928–31

Site: Vouni

Vouni is a steep hill on the north-west coast of Cyprus, west of Soli, where Alfred Westholm excavated for the Swedish Cyprus Expedition from spring 1928 to autumn 1929. These 124 field photographs by John Lindros come from the museum's folders for rooms 1–45 and 46–65 of the building the excavators called the palace. They show walls and stair flights emerging from the fill, cut-rock floors, doorways and fallen stones. Room 47 is the central court, with its cistern and, on its south side, a broad staircase of seven steps up to the reception rooms; Rooms 10–14 are the western store-rooms, whose cemented floors kept the hollows in which pithoi stood. A few prints carry their own notes, among them the landowner Charalampos beside a sculpted head (no. 290).

Many negatives appear to date from the supplementary digging that followed the main campaign. The rooms are described in SCE III, which dates the building from about 500 BC to its destruction in the early fourth century. What it was is disputed: Gjerstad read it as the seat of kings allied first with Persia and then with the Greeks, while Pontus Hellström has argued for an Achaemenid garrison. See the excavation, Westholm's notebooks DII:3A and DII:3C, and rooms 66–135.

Sources

Gjerstad, E., Lindros, J., Sjöqvist, E. and Westholm, A. 1937. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition: Finds and Results of the Excavations in Cyprus 1927–1931, vol. III. Stockholm, pp. 76, 111–228, 280–290, 292.
Hellström, P. 2009. "The Palace of Vouni Revisited". In Medelhavsmuseet: Focus on the Mediterranean 4. Stockholm, pp. 28–42.