Nea Paphos: the Italian mission of the University of Catania (Garrison's Camp, Toumballos)

At Nea Paphos the Italian mission uncovered a 72 m dromos leading to two large underground chambers, a small double-apsed church of the end of the 4th century AD, and a residential quarter that leaned against the dromos wall¹. The University of Catania mission explored this area from 1988, with the Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene as partner². The area, about a quarter of the ancient city, was assigned to the mission under an agreement between the Republic of Cyprus and the Republic of Italy¹.

The first seasons

Filippo Giudice, Professor at the Università di Catania, directed the work from 1988². Excavation began in July 1988 around the Garrison Camp, in the north-western part of the city¹. Nikolaou had read the emptied chambers in 1966 as a Ptolemaic military camp with a camp sanctuary, perhaps for an Egyptian god. Młynarczyk rejected that reading in 1990: the complex was too large and well planned for a camp sanctuary, and its position at the edge of town fits a chthonic cult with mysteries¹. Nikolaou's article was the point of departure of the excavators' own investigations³. They declined at first to judge the nature of the emptied chambers and studied the remains around the sanctuary, east of the staircase, west of the chambers and north of them¹.

The first campaign was reported in RDAC 1992 by Giudice, Maugeri, Pafumi, Malfitana and Sgarlata⁴. The second campaign (1989) appeared in RDAC 1993⁵ and the campaign of 1990 in RDAC 1994⁴. Excavation was by stratigraphic layers: hypogean chamber I was emptied in five layers down to a flat surface of blocks, with finds assigned to layers, such as coins from layer V¹.

The sanctuary

The northern wall of the dromos is preserved in polygonal masonry along its 72 m; only two blocks of the southern wall survive, the rest having been dismantled and reused for the Early Christian quarter. Votive pits are cut in the rock along it, partly emptied by the Christians, and a votive shrine near the steps gave pottery of the 3rd-2nd centuries BC¹. Two large underground chambers, one trapezoidal and one rectangular, open through rock-cut doors at the end of the dromos. The oldest finds in them are three fragments of two Attic Panathenaic prize amphorae (about 340–336 BC), a black-glazed bowl and an inscribed capital of the 4th century BC; Hellenistic tableware and lamps dominate¹. In 1998 and 1999 the subterranean openings into the chambers were explored, and the dromos showed two floor levels separated by a destruction layer⁶.

From the votive pits came a fragment of an Attic red-figure bell-krater showing Artemis, which J. McPhee dated to about 400–390 BC, along with a marble torso, small votive scissors, a gold earring, a gold ring with a horse protome and a terracotta staff with coiled serpents¹. Giudice, Giudice and Fuduli (2025) note that the Artemis fragment predates the traditional foundation of Nea Paphos by Nikokles in the last decade of the 4th century BC, and suggest that the sanctuary may predate the city¹.

The attribution to Apollo rests on the similarity of the chambers to those of the sanctuary of Apollo Hylates; Herscher reported in 1998 that no definitive confirmation of the identification had been recovered, and Giudice speculates that the sanctuary may have been the seat of one or possibly more cults^1,7. North of the sanctuary, tests at the sides of a large oval depression revealed a small training stadium (xystos), probably preceded by stoai to the north behind the city walls^1,3.

The church and the Christian quarter

The chambers were closed at the beginning of the 5th century AD, when a large Early Christian domus and then a villa were built above¹. The small church stood partly on the sanctuary structures and partly on two large rectangular plastered pools, with two narthexes, a central nave, inner and outer apse and a crypt; in the crypt were a lamp, a bowl, two jugs and a fragmentary amphora, a possible service for a saint^1,3. Giudice (2009) describes it as one of the most ancient Early Christian basilicas of Cyprus, proposes that it was a memoria of St Hilarion, and offers a marble fragment reading ION or PION and another read as the apostle Paul in support³. A fragment of a marble inscription from the 1999 campaign was reported in the press as evidence for St Paul in Cyprus⁸. Keane (2024) describes the church as a small chapel a few metres above an earlier hypogaeum temple, and notes that its tomb in the nave has prompted an interpretation as a locus sanctus⁹.

Around it the area became a residential quarter of houses, courtyards and streets leaning on the northern wall of the dromos, with a fountain and mosaics¹. In 1998 several houses and a large fountain reused in the medieval period were excavated there, with mosaics in the southern houses⁶. On the hill behind the sanctuary, tests found three rooms of a building, a watchtower according to Giudice, of the end of the medieval period, with a sealed deposit of late medieval pottery and coins, among them a Venetian coin of Doge Girolamo Priuli (1559–1567)^3,10.

Later seasons and publication

In 2008, Filippo Giudice and Giada Giudice worked in three areas: the trench south-east of the underground temple, the edge of a newly expropriated area, and the Early Christian domus east of the temple. Fallen blocks over a domus suggested an earthquake, a Hellenistic-Roman sanctuary wall lay beneath it, and a channel in a reused block held a lamp and over 100 copper coins¹¹. By 20 September 2018 work along an east-west rocky bank in the southern part of the site had found niches probably for lamps, an Early Christian wall about 11.6 m long and two rooms of a new Early Christian house, with Late Classical and Hellenistic material below; Elvia Giudice is named as co-director in the press notices for that season¹².

The twelfth campaign (1999) was published in RDAC 2011–2012⁴. In 2025 Giudice, Giudice and Fuduli published a synthesis of the excavations of 1988–2018¹.