Kral Tepesi/Vasili (Galinoporni-Vasili): the hoard rescue and excavation

In June 2004 hikers found a pithos set into the bedrock of the hill of Kral Tepesi/Vasili, and it held 26 bronze objects: 16 vessels, three offering stands, five sickles, a shovel and a saw, about 15.5 kg in all¹. The Department of Archaeology and Art History of the Eastern Mediterranean University informed the "Department of Antiquities and Museums" in Famagusta, a body of the Turkish Cypriot authorities in the occupied north, and the hoard was recovered the next day under its supervision^1,2. Bartelheim and colleagues date it to Late Cypriot IIC/IIIA, on its forms and an adjacent stirrup jar, and call it the largest known finished-goods hoard of Late Bronze Age Cyprus¹. Summerer gives 34 metal vessels and tools for the same hoard². It was taken to the St. Barnabas Museum, where it was kept when published in 2008¹.

Uwe Müller began a rescue excavation with a team from the University of Tübingen². Bartelheim and colleagues write that the danger from looters was felt to be very serious, and that the excavation then aimed to secure and present the site¹. The first phase ran from 2005 to 2009 under Müller, with Martin Bartelheim and Ernst Pernicka as metallurgy specialists; the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung funded it³. Matthew Harpster reports a maritime survey of the Karpas coast in August 2008 under a permit granted to Eastern Mediterranean University and Tübingen faculty by the Turkish Cypriot authorities in the occupied north, not by the Republic of Cyprus, which recorded material from 6th-century BC amphoras to 14th-century Lusignan pottery⁴. Tübingen ended its cooperation in 2015².

Bülent Kızılduman has directed the second phase since 2014, when a second hoard of 111 bronze objects was found^2,3. According to the university's project page, the excavated building is a large Late Bronze Age structure with storage vessels, a production area and painted wall plaster, a three-line Cypro-Minoan inscription on burnt clay and signs of earthquake damage, above at least four large round houses⁵. Bartelheim and colleagues interpret the settlement as a political and economic centre, and possibly a cult and ritual centre¹. The university lists the excavation as ongoing⁵.