Ormidhia: Department rescue at Lakkos Glykys (1991)

In 1991 a rescue excavation in the yard of a modern house at Lakkos Glykys, west of the hill of Pithkiavli at Ormidhia, uncovered walls of a public building built of very large hewn limestone blocks, some with plaster on the wall face¹. The house stood on plot 672, and the work was done under the supervision of Maria Hadjicosti for the Department of Antiquities¹.

Very few diagnostic sherds date the building to the Hellenistic and Roman period¹. Hadjicosti sees it as part of a Hellenistic and Roman settlement at Lakkos Glykys, whose cemetery may be the Hellenistic tombs recently excavated at Ambeli, about 500 m to the south¹. The little earlier material suggests that the Pithkiavli and Lakkos Glykys areas were inhabited already in the Cypro-Geometric and Cypro-Archaic periods¹. The Hellenistic and Roman sherds and fragments of large Hellenistic amphoras are registered as M LA 1572 in the Larnaka District Museum, and Hadjicosti published the excavation in her 2001 chapter on Ormideia¹.

Local builders had earlier reported walls, figurines and tombs found while modern houses were built, which Hadjicosti used to estimate the extent of the settlement and cemetery; a rich tomb on plot 203 was looted before the Department of Antiquities knew of it¹.