Marion: the Swedish Cyprus Expedition

In 1929 the Swedish Cyprus Expedition opened 98 tombs at Marion and drew a measured plan and cross-section of every one, showing where the objects lay and the different periods of use^1,2. The burials ran from Cypro-Geometric I-II to the Hellenistic period¹.

Erik Sjöqvist conducted the excavations at Polis². Einar Gjerstad, the leader of the expedition, took part in the soundings, and the team included Alfred Westholm and the architect John Lindros^1,2. Gjerstad remembered that Sjöqvist made his way to Marion in March 1929³. The season lasted until the end of July according to Gjerstad and his co-authors, and until early July according to Childs^1,2. Childs quotes Gjerstad as arguing that the study of the cultural connections between Cyprus and Greece would be finished by excavation at Polis tis Chrysochou².

Trenches in the two settlements

The trial trenches were meant to test whether Marion lay under the visible Hellenistic and later town of Arsinoe, or to the east. Time and money prevented a larger excavation¹. In the western settlement two trenches, 2 m wide and 16.0 m and 6.40 m long, were dug at right angles through all the debris to the rock. They exposed house walls with three floors: the uppermost walls were dated Roman and Byzantine, those below Hellenistic, and the lowest had Late Archaic and Classical sherds. The culture deposit was only 0.20–0.25 m deep¹.

One sounding was made in the eastern settlement, about 1.5 km east¹. It found only Roman-period house walls, and the authors cautioned that the pit may have lain outside the walls of an earlier town¹. Gjerstad and his co-authors thought the exact position and extent of Marion still uncertain, but that the Late Archaic and Classical city lay below Hellenistic Arsinoe¹.

The tombs of Kaparka and Evrethades

The expedition followed earlier tomb clearances at Marion by Ohnefalsch-Richter, Munro and Tubbs, Markides and Gunnis¹. It dug fifty tombs, numbered 1–13 and 62–98, in the eastern necropolis (Sikarka-Kokkina, Potamos tou Myrmikof, Evrethades), and forty-eight, numbered 14–61, at Kaparka in the western necropolis¹. Childs notes that Geometric tombs were located for the first time at Evrethades, east of the town².

Men and women worked on the dig; women usually hauled up buckets of earth from the tombs and searched them for finds². The soil was read closely enough to tell tombs disturbed by flooding from those disturbed by people². In Kaparka Tomb 41, three burials were recorded, two of them female. Flooding had pooled the Attic red-figure lekythos by the Providence Painter at the centre of the tomb, while a gold pomegranate pendant lay close to where it was likely placed on a bench². Tomb 53 had been robbed in antiquity; it held three burials, two of them in stone-built sarcophagi, one with a stele at its end, and a limestone seated woman with a small attendant stood in the dromos¹. Tomb 60 was joined to Tomb 61 by cutting a recess when a niche broke through the dividing wall. It held six interments, among them a richly adorned woman who wore a gold necklace and hair-rings, and the later burials are early Hellenistic¹. At Evrethades, a square stele with a Cypriote syllabic inscription lay in the roof-collapse debris above the chamber of Tomb 77, apparently from a monument that stood on the surface¹.

Tombs were often reused for repeated burials, sometimes centuries apart, and built stone sarcophagi appear in the later Classical tombs^1,2. Stelae and terracotta or stone figures of the deceased stood in dromoi or above the tomb, and one coin was found in the mouth of the deceased in Tomb 9¹. Cypro-Geometric III is absent, which the authors think may reflect a gap in habitation. They explain the small number of Hellenistic tombs by the main Hellenistic necropolis lying elsewhere¹. Childs credits the expedition with showing that the necropoleis were chronologically mixed, against the earlier view of an earlier eastern and a later western cemetery. He also notes that the tomb plans were not set on a full town map, so the positions of the tomb groups are unclear².

The finds

Finds were taken back to Nicosia by Volvo and camel². A 1930 memorandum on the Swedish Mission's finds of 1927–1930 provides a division between the Cyprus Museum and Sweden, with the other finds to be divided as provisionally agreed between Markides, Gunnis and Gjerstad⁴. Objects from the Marion tombs can carry SCE Marion P.T. numbers, as in the Tomb 41 lekythos (SCE Marion P.T. 41.11) in the Cyprus Museum². Childs says most objects from Polis are now in the Local Museum of Marion and Arsinoe, which opened in 2000; its Tomb 60 gold necklace with an amphoroid pendant is MMA 372².

The results appeared in The Swedish Cyprus Expedition: Finds and Results of the Excavations in Cyprus 1927–1931, Volume II (1935), where the Marion section runs from page 181 to 458 and gives tomb-by-tomb reports with object registers¹. Childs reports that several of the tomb fields are now covered by houses, restaurants and shops as Polis has grown into a tourist centre².