Galinoporni: Swedish Cyprus Expedition at Trachonas, Kapsalia and Oura

At Trachonas the Swedish Cyprus Expedition cleared a built tumulus tomb with a false-vaulted chamber and two relief figures above its entrance, a Cypro-Archaic tomb that had been used again in Hellenistic times. The work took ten days at the end of April 1928. Einar Gjerstad was chief of the Expedition, and Erik Sjöqvist was in charge of the archaeological work at Galinoporni-Trachonas^1,2.

The locality is described as an ancient burial ground with tombs from Cypro-Geometric II through Hellenistic times, most of them rifled¹. The tomb was built in a large rock-cut pit, with a stepped dromos, a chamber and a false barrel-vault. The dromos kept a remnant of its original filling beside a later, secondary filling, and the excavators read this as evidence for two burial periods. The chamber held only a small, apparently near-intact deposit of dark-brown burial earth and sherds. Robbers had disturbed the tomb as a whole¹. The two figures above the entrance are in profile; the report interprets them as a ritual dance and suggests they may be death-daemons rather than human beings¹. The report dates the tomb to the middle of the Cypro-Archaic I period from its structure, reliefs and sherds from a deposit it considers possibly intact, and dates the pottery of the secondary filling and the removed chamber deposits to the Late Hellenistic period and a second burial¹.

Alfred Westholm reports that the sanctuary at Oura was excavated in 1928; it yielded many limestone statuette fragments, most too poorly preserved to keep, a large bearded head that he dates to the late sixth century BC, and a seated limestone statue, 0.95 m high and 0.53 m wide at its greatest³. He dates the statue to shortly before 500 BC and proposes that it probably represents a Cypriot king or priest³. The statue belongs to the Cyprus Collections in Stockholm, Acc. 225³. The Trachonas tomb is published in volume III of The Swedish Cyprus Expedition: Finds and Results of the Excavations in Cyprus 1927–1931, pages 461 to 466¹.