Kourion: Megaw's excavation of the episcopal basilica

In 1956 soundings at the episcopal basilica at Kourion recorded a nave separated from its aisles by 12 columns on each side¹. A. H. S. Megaw, Director of the Department of Antiquities, was asked to continue the investigation for the Pennsylvania University Museum Expedition, which had closed its excavations in 1953 and left the building partly uncleared^1,2. The soundings also re-examined pits dug by the earlier excavators and found no floors earlier than the church¹. At the west end the report records a paved court with a hexagonal phiale and a group of rooms with mosaic pavements, which Megaw suggested might be the episcopal residence¹.

Mitford records a marble inscription fragment found in Megaw's excavation of the basilica in the spring of 1959³. In the autumn of 1959 the Department completed the clearance, uncovering about 50 m of narrow, stepped street beside the church, which the report suggests formed a principal route across the city, and re-erecting two columns⁴. Wall-mosaic fragments found in position in a side chapel showed parts of three standing figures, interpreted in the report as saints, and were taken to the Cyprus Museum for treatment by experts of the Byzantine Institute of America⁴. The 1959 report reads the annexes as probably the rooms for catechumens⁴.

Megaw suggested a fifth-century date from the surviving capitals and pavement mosaics¹. Dikaios's report on the 1959 completion gives the early fifth century and says the church was probably completed before the time of Zeno, bishop of Kourion, who defended the independence of the Cypriot church at the Council of Ephesus in 431². The 1959 account attributes traces of fire in the basilica probably to the Arab invasions of the mid-seventh century⁴. Megaw's 1956 soundings are in his Archaeology in Cyprus, 1956 in Archaeological Reports, and the 1959 work in Karageorghis's chronicle for that year^1,4.