Kafizin: the Department of Antiquities excavations

At Kafizin, a conical hill with a natural grotto, the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus recovered a Hellenistic sanctuary and a votive assemblage of which more than 300 vessels carry Cypro-syllabic or Greek alphabetic inscriptions¹. The formal excavation took place in June and July 1949, with responsibility shared between Porphyrios Dikaios, Curator of the Cyprus Museum, and T. B. Mitford². Trench T.2, a broad cutting from the cave toward the foot of the hill, was the most productive; T.3 below the cistern and T.5 at the cistern also gave finds². Mitford described the cavern as a grotto sanctuary whose floor was extended by a retaining wall, with a low rock-cut shelf for offerings and a plastered bottle-shaped cistern cut into a nearby terrace².

Supplementary work followed in each year from 1950 to 1955. Labourers stripped sections of the slopes to bedrock in short campaigns under a Museum staff member². In 1950 the slopes below the cave yielded numerous fragments of inscribed vessels³. The Department's final campaign, in 1954 and funded through Mitford, brought the number of restorable inscribed dedicatory vases to nearly 100, with A. Kingaby assisting in restoration⁴. Chrysostomos Paraskeva, Senior Attendant to the Cyprus Museum, later spent many months restoring the pottery².

Mitford published 309 numbered inscribed texts in 1980 and noted that several thousand uninscribed sherds remained to be studied². He dated the inscribed pottery to 225–218 BC, from seven Ptolemaic regnal years read or restored in the inscriptions². Sidonie Lejeune later dated the sanctuary's short period of use to 183–177 BC¹. The report Dikaios was expected to write was never completed². The Cyprus Museum held evidence for about 310 inscribed vessels and terracotta utensils⁵.