Potamia-Agios Sozomenos: the Franco-Cypriot landscape project

The Potamia-Agios Sozomenos project documented a royal manor, its village and a water-management landscape, with a large square reservoir 10 m on a side fed by a monumental noria¹. Nolwenn Lécuyer directed it from the Université de Provence for the École française d'Athènes, with the University of Cyprus as partner and Gilles Grivaud among the collaborators². The aim was to reconstruct a major Frankish estate in the East and to study the landscape's settlement, water use, social organization and the relations between Frankish and Byzantine populations². The study area was a deliberately limited window of about 10 km² around Potamia and Ayios Sozomenos, which Lécuyer cautioned could give only a partial picture¹.

Fieldwork began in 2000 with detailed survey, GIS mapping, a plan and elevation of the chapel of Saint Catherine, and trial trenches at the chapel of Archangel Michael, where a sounding reached fourteenth-century levels^1,3. During a visit that year, a hoard of 373 silver coins was found by chance at Potamia in front of Agios Mamas; Lécuyer dates it to 1368 to 1373^1,3. A 2001 sounding near Saint-Mamas at Agios Sozomenos led Lécuyer to assign the village's foundation to the first phase of the manor landscape. In summer 2003 a sounding at Paleomylos reached the floor of the mill's grinding room¹. The excavations of 2002 and 2003 produced 20,000 sherds, with stratigraphy in the manor's hydraulic complex, north court and the Paleomylos mill, and Lucy Vallauri studied a survey sample of 46,000 sherds⁴.

Steel reports three architectural phases at the manor: a late-fourteenth-century ashlar phase, a repair phase and a later phase in unfired mud brick and timber framing³. Lécuyer dates the reservoir to about 1365 and interprets it as earlier than the residential buildings, and she attributes the destruction of the manor and the burning of Potamia village in 1427 to Mamluk raiding¹. Her 2004 article describes an inquiry conducted from 2000 to 2004 in four campaigns and says that many interpretations remain hypotheses pending the final publication; Hermary's 2012 history says that a final publication was still in preparation^1,5. By 2004 agriculture, urbanization and new irrigation were erasing visible traces, and the Department of Antiquities had begun restoration work on the manor¹.