Kourion: the Department's basilica east of the stadium (Demeter and Kore site)

Two marble slabs reused in a church east of the stadium at Kourion, with pagan scenes incised on their backs, were among the finds of a four-year excavation by the Department of Antiquities¹. A. Christodoulou, Assistant archaeological officer of the Department, directed the work from 1971 until the Turkish invasion of 1974^2,3. The building lies about 200 m east of the stadium³.

The 1971 notice describes a three-aisled basilica with three projecting apses, a synthronon in the central apse, wall mosaics, and marble paving in the central aisle with limestone slabs in the side aisles; lime kilns stood nearby, and a trough-shaped tomb lined with limestone slabs was set into a niche in the north wall⁴. In 1972 the excavators exposed the north chapel, the corridor between it and the church, the narthex, the east side of the atrium and three rooms west of the chapel; Hellenistic terracotta figurine fragments lay in a layer below the destroyed floor of one room². The 1973 season continued in the atrium and four rooms to its north, and the report describes a four-sided portico, limestone paving, and a cistern later converted into a lime kiln⁵. In 1974 a street along the south side, with the north and south entrances, was exposed¹. The report dates the two reused slabs stylistically to 250–450 CE; one shows a probable water nymph, the other Amymone, Poseidon and a satyr¹.

Bourrier argues that the basilica was probably built in the early fifth century and renovated within that century, citing a coin of Honorius struck at Antioch in 403–408 and a coin of Heraclius struck at Constantinople in 640–641³. He holds that it was not built on the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore itself³. Christodoulou left the excavation during the Turkish invasion of 1974, taking his notebooks³. Bourrier's 2013 study in Cahiers du Centre d'Études Chypriotes 43 treats the basilica's plan, phases and setting³.