Asclepius Street, Nicosia: salvage excavation (2009)

In 2009 Chrysanthi Kounnou of the Department of Antiquities, assisted by Georgios Koumis, opened four trenches in the courtyard of a listed building on Asclepius Street, where basement construction was proposed¹. They exposed part of a building at least 10 m north–south and 8 m east–west, whose preserved foundations were continuous arches in the outer and internal walls; the report describes this as a technique of the Ottoman period and of folk-architecture houses, and the pottery is Ottoman¹. Below it lay a small rectangular structure of worked sandstone, founded in hard soil and preserved to a maximum height of 1 m, which contained glazed pottery of the 14th century AD and cooking-ware sherds¹. According to the report, this lower structure had been destroyed and abandoned and was no longer visible when the later building was put up¹.