Ayia Irini: the Italian Mission

At Ayia Irini on the Kyrenia coast, the Italian mission dug a Late Bronze Age chamber with 31 burials in three superimposed layers and about 400 objects, over 300 of them vessels, together with a seaside necropolis whose tombs run from Late Cypriot I to the Archaic period^1,2. The work was done from 1970 to 1973 by the Istituto per gli Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici of Rome (ISMEA), with support from the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche^3,4.

Beginning in 1970

Di Paolo explains that ISMEA planned a Cyprus project in 1970 on the island's role between East and West, and that Karageorghis proposed Ayia Irini for the early Late Bronze Age, then poorly known⁵. Di Paolo adds that the Department of Antiquities, which had denounced looting of the Late Bronze Age cemetery, decided to grant permission for official excavations⁵. The annual report calls 1970 the mission's first campaign, and Carlo Gallavotti headed it from 1970 to 1972^2,3.

The first campaign worked in three sectors. In Sector 1, on the hill of Ayia Irini-Palaeokastro, aerial photographs had identified orthogonal structures in a T-shaped area of about 15 by 27 m. It held late Hellenistic to early Roman houses along a street, with a well, basins, and a room with millstones and lamps. Sector 5, to the west, produced terrace walls, and in the necropolis (Sector 7) seven chamber tombs were dug².

The seaside necropolis

The tombs are chamber tombs cut in soft rock, entered by dromos or shaft. Tomb 3, used in the Late Cypriot and Cypro-Archaic periods, held about 300 objects including two Aegean cups and two cylinder seals, and had already been found by clandestine diggers². Franco Biancofiore initially carried out the necropolis excavation and P. E. Pecorella continued it⁵. In 1971 fifteen tombs were dug, fourteen of them plundered, and numbered 8 to 22; Tombs 10, 11, 12, 15, 17, 20, 21 and 22 are Late Cypriot I, and 8, 9, 13, 14, 18 and 19 Archaic¹. In 1972 twenty-five tombs, all Archaic, were excavated, several of them intact, with a Euboean skyphos and one rock-cut tomb with a built stomion³.

Tomb 21 held a very well preserved earliest burial with bronzes, tongs and spiral-bead necklaces; later work notes balance weights, scale pans and metalworking tools beside the body^1,5,6. Webb dates its first burial layer to LC IA:2, and argues that the evidence for commerce and metalworking at Ayia Irini in LC I is as early as, if not earlier than, that from any other coastal settlement in Late Bronze Age Cyprus, including Enkomi⁶. A cup from Tomb 3 with a double-axe motif is in the Cyprus Museum; Pecorella attributed the cups of Tombs 3 and 20 to LH IIA, while Driessen and Macdonald state that certain cups were "without question LM IA"^7,8.

The town and the cave-like tomb

In 1971 the town excavation, under L. Quilici, covered 900 sq m, and the urban sector was surveyed completely at 1:100; a transverse trench 90 m by 2 m was opened at the narrow end of the site to see the stratigraphy¹. The excavation exposed a Roman-period quarter of narrow streets, small squares with wells and multi-storey stuccoed houses, and a tower of the enclosure wall¹. In 1972 M. and Mme Quilici directed the excavation of a large part of the small Hellenistic and Roman town, with houses with bathrooms and workshops, public baths, three parallel streets and a thick enclosure wall with square towers on the south. The excavators argue that its plan goes back to the end of the Classical period³.

At the south-west corner of the town wall a cave-like chamber of 1.50 by 3 m was found by accident. Besides the 31 burials and about 400 objects, it held two probable Cretan cups and 26 Syrian vases¹. Eriksson, citing Quilici 1990, reports six strata and at least 37 burials⁹.

Kharangas

L. Rocchetti directed the work at Ayia Irini-Kharangas, a group of Geometric tombs about 100 m south of the village. In 1971 five small, poor tombs were dug, with plain coarse pottery that has parallels at Lapithos, and in 1972 five more, all plundered^1,3,4.

The 1973 trenches

Giovanni Rizza directed the fourth season, from mid-September to the end of October 1973^10,11. Its aim was to fix the archaeological context and the succession of layers on the Palaeokastro hill, especially the poorly known earliest ones¹¹. A trench on the north slope reached bedrock at about 4.80 m and showed continuous occupation from the first half of the second millennium to the Hellenistic period, with White Slip at the bottom, Protogeometric and Geometric floors above, then Archaic and Classical levels. A second trench on the eastern edge exposed at least two or three enclosure walls of undetermined date and a Hellenistic room¹¹. Archaeological activity in the north was interrupted in 1974 by the Turkish occupation of the northern side of the island⁵. Selected vessels of the coastal necropolis are stored in the Cyprus Museum⁴.