Ledra, Nicosia: Pilides's excavations on the Hill of Agios Georgios

On the Hill of Agios Georgios at Ledra in Nicosia, excavators traced eleven parallel roads with a sewage channel along the centre, and workshops whose hearths and underground firing kilns numbered 86 by the count of 2009^1,2. Despo Pilides of the Department of Antiquities directed the work from the summer of 1996, as a rescue excavation on a plot of 15,745 sq. m. that had to be investigated before the new House of Representatives was built^2,3. Four seasons had been run by the autumn of 1998, and Fox and colleagues count 16 field seasons in all^3,4.

A circular stone building over bedrock, beneath the south-west Cypro-Archaic building, is dated Late Chalcolithic by its pottery; Pilides writes that it may belong to that period^3,5. The Cypro-Archaic II reoccupation left fragmentary buildings with fire destruction, bothroi, and pits holding figurines, masks, chariot models and astragaloi^1,3. In the 4th century a four-phase building with cisterns was built over Cypro-Archaic remains, and a black-glazed cup from it carries a post-firing inscription referring to a prince (wanax) named Timas². The Hellenistic workshops yielded cisterns, hearths, ovens, raw clay, ochre, unfired loomweights and figurine wasters, and copper, iron and lead were all worked¹. The latest coins are of Cleopatra VII and Ptolemy Caesar XVI (47–44 BC), and Pilides suggests the settlement was abandoned or shifted by the middle of the 1st century BC^1,2. At the corner of Nikokreontos and Hadjopoulou streets, in an eastern extension, a cloth bag held 36 silver coins struck in Cyprus with Cypro-syllabic legends; Pilides dates the hoard to around the Ionian Revolt and calls it the oldest hoard found in Cyprus².

Pilides argues that the evidence for the hill being the city-kingdom of Ledroi is thin: there is little before the 7th century BC, and excavation has not revealed a civic centre². In 1999 a large area between St George's chapel and Denosthenis Severis Avenue produced four phases of an Early Christian church, kilns to the north and 185 burials⁵. Fox and colleagues report four churches with their cemeteries on the site, dating from around the 7th century AD to the post-medieval period, and 216 individuals recovered in all⁴. A chapel of St George the Healer stands in the central apse of one of the church phases⁴.