Saranda Kolones: the British School at Athens and Anglo-American expedition

The castle of Saranda Kolones at Kato Paphos is a small residential fortress built on the ruins of the earlier city¹. Nine massive piers ring its central court, there are undercrofts below a piano nobile, and reused granite columns laid in the tower walls give the site its name^1,2. An outer wall with eight towers and a rock-cut ditch surround it². The castle was known to have been destroyed by the earthquake of 1222, and its last occupants were Crusaders².

The British School seasons

Arthur Hubert Stanley Megaw resumed clearance of the castle for the British School at Athens at the end of September 1966, for four weeks, with the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus lending equipment; the Russell Trust and Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust funded the work^1,3. J. W. Hayes (2003) says the School's excavations resumed in 1965, while Megaw's report and the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique chronicle give 1966^1,3,4. The team included students of the School and the architect R. J. C. Jamieson¹. In that season the floor was reached over more than half the central building, all nine piers of the court were located, the entrance tower was completed and the south-west corner tower was exposed, robbed to its foundations³. Part of the debris in the south ditch was removed with mechanical equipment after the outer south wall and tower had been excavated by conventional methods¹. The Department carried out structural conservation, including restoring a pier and a vaulting rib, in the 1966 and 1967 seasons^1,5.

Megaw hoped a further campaign would settle whether the castle was first built about 1100 or earlier¹. A second season in September and October 1967 exposed the last unexcavated stretch of the outer wall and the north-west tower, and reached the floor throughout the central court and most undercrofts, which held stabling, a forge, a steam bath and an animal-driven mill^5,6. Among the finds were the remains of earthquake victims, including the scattered bones of a young woman with two gold rings⁵.

In 1970, over five weeks from the end of March, the British School worked in association with Dumbarton Oaks. The season was devoted chiefly to soundings beneath the floors in use in 1222, mainly in the West Hall beside the pentagonal tower. They found seventh-century pottery with lamps associated with the Arab sack of about 654, a small hoard of Crusader coins and a rock-cut water-distribution system⁷. John Rosser is listed with Dumbarton Oaks in the 1970 team⁷. In March 1971 the team studied the 1970 finds and worked in two sectors of the West Hall, where secondary domestic buildings against the outer wall held a sword, iron utensils, bronze bowls, incised glazed plates and a south Italian painted bowl on floors dated by the 1222 earthquake⁸.

The Anglo-American campaigns

Work resumed in May 1981 after a decade, for two months, financed by the School, Dumbarton Oaks and Boston College, with Megaw and Rosser, who represented Boston College, as directors⁹. Earthwatch was a co-sponsor². The campaigns of 1981 to 1983 used stratigraphic soundings to re-test the working hypothesis that this was the Byzantine castle surrendered in 1191².

In 1981 the north-east tower and the adjoining inner section were cleared, with two donkey mills and a molasses pot⁹. In 1982 the ditch debris was cleared on the north and north-west and the counterscarp defined; the east ditch held the remains of a bridge with three parallel arcades¹⁰. The excavators read the mill room as a sugar mill, with a wine press as an alternative¹⁰. The 1983 campaign, the tenth, completed the exposure of the domestic installations: the western extension of the mill room, with a second, dismantled mill, and the Furnace Room with its marble hearth and iron furnace door¹¹. More than 1,500 mangonel balls lay in the mill-room debris².

The eleventh and last excavation campaign, in May and June 1984, cleared the north-west corner tower of the castle proper, with an oubliette, and excavated the ditch further, including a rock-cut stair tunnel to a water channel. Behind the east counterscarp lay a hoard of 76 bronze coins¹². Study seasons followed in 1986 and 1987¹³. In 1987 the work covered photography, preparation for final publication and investigation of earlier remains beneath the castle; late Hellenistic and early Roman debris in the south-west tower foundations lay over three earlier buildings and a possible small watch-tower¹³.

Dating the castle

In 1966 Megaw thought the castle could have been built by the Byzantines after the Arab withdrawal and dismantled after the treaty of 688, or built after 965, and saw something to be said for the years around 1100¹. By 1971 he was inclining to a Byzantine start soon after the Arab raids, left unfinished⁸. In 1983 Karageorghis wrote that the earlier identification with the Byzantine castellum surrendered in 1191 was doubtful, and proposed that Saranda Kolones could reasonably be identified as the seigneurial castle of the County of Baphe¹⁰. Rosser concluded in 1985 that the castle is one homogeneous structure built no earlier than the late twelfth century, and describes it as one of the earliest examples of the medieval concentric castle². Hayes dates the building to the years around AD 1180/90–1200⁴.

The finds

The iron furnace door was lifted in one piece in 1983 by A. Georghiades, technician of the Museum Laboratory, and taken to the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia; the 76-coin hoard was under treatment at the museum in 1984^2,11,12. The pottery is stored on site and in the Paphos Regional Museum; in 1987 all earlier finds were checked and moved to the Paphos Museum in new crates the temporary store was termite-infested^4,13. Rosser published the 1981 to 1983 seasons in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 39, and Hayes published the Hellenistic and Roman pottery deposits in the Annual of the British School at Athens 98^2,4. Hayes states that the later pottery finds have been prepared for publication in the major site report by Megaw, Bakirtzis and himself⁴.