Golgoi: the University of Thessaloniki Mission

In the eastern part of the settlement at Giorkous, near Athienou, a Greek mission exposed an enclosure wall with a stone lower structure and mud-brick upper courses, a stepped postern protected by two bastions, houses and, in the southwest of the excavation, a small Early Christian basilica^1,2,3. Georghios Bakalakis directed the work for the University of Thessaloniki in four annual seasons from 1969 to 1972^3,4,5. Hermary reports that the excavations were stopped in 1974 by the Turkish invasion⁶.

The 1969 and 1970 seasons

The 1969 report calls the work exploratory, in a small part of the town, where two houses were fully cleared⁴. It distinguished three periods. The upper remains included houses and copper slag; lower deposits held more complex houses, ashes and burnt soil, bronze arrowheads, a lead sling-bullet and two coins of Demetrios Poliorketes, and the deepest levels gave Archaic and early Classical pottery^4,7. The report records the coins, struck between 306 and 294 BC, in the upper part of a wall and uses them as chronological evidence for the second phase, presenting destruction during the Ptolemaic-Antigonid conflict as a possibility⁴. Other finds included local and Attic pottery and sherds bearing Cypriot syllabic writing, on which Olivier Masson commented⁴. The report stated that conclusive proof identifying the site as Golgoi was lacking and noted that the place was known as Giorkous. Hermary later regarded the identification as nearly certain^4,8, and argues that Golgoi was probably a small community dependent on a larger kingdom, not the capital of a kingdom⁸.

In 1970 the team expanded work in the eastern town sector and opened stratigraphic sections: 2 m square test squares at 4 m intervals along the eastern edge, over a total length of 40.50 m¹. They exposed two cisterns and 39.50 m of the eastern city wall, with an eastern entrance with steps and a square bastion. Archaic pottery lay beneath later houses^1,5. Two Mycenaean sherds, one from a stirrup jar, came from fill used for a later house floor; the report takes them to push the town's history back to the end of the second millennium BC, the soil probably having been taken from elsewhere in or near the town¹.

The wall, the houses and the basilica

The 1971 work concentrated between the enclosure wall and the Archaic and Classical houses. House floors produced Cypriot and Attic pottery, including an Attic sherd with an incised owner's name, and syllabic inscriptions in ink on sherds². The report records traces of copper casting and a headless, mutilated statue it identifies as Apollo in Praxitelean style, as well as statue fragments, arrowheads, coins, a limestone altar and fragments of limestone incense-burners among the finds from houses covered by debris after a destruction of Golgoi at the beginning of the third century BC; two fountains were also investigated².

The fourth season was confined to the eastern part of the hill. It investigated houses, three towers and much of the enclosure wall, and cleared six rooms of a Graeco-Roman building^3,9. The 1972 report reads pottery outside the wall as indicating that the wall seems to have been destroyed after Ptolemaic rule was established³.

Hadjichristophi describes the basilica as a three-aisled building measuring 16.60 by 11 m, dates it broadly to the fifth or sixth century while noting that the remains do not permit a precise date, and calls it the only secondary basilica in the region to have been scientifically excavated¹⁰.

Publication and finds

A fragmentary limestone statuette identified as the Cypriot Pan, excavated from House 1 at Golgoi, is in the Athienou Municipal Museum under the number Γλ. 1¹¹. The final monograph, by Bakalakis, appeared in 1988 in the series of the Archaeological Society of Athens¹², and Masson published the syllabic inscriptions from the 1969 to 1972 excavations in Kadmos in 1989¹³. Bakirtzis published the basilica in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus in 1976¹⁴.