Saranda Kolones: Department of Antiquities excavation under A. H. S. Megaw

The mound of Saranda Kolones at Nea Paphos was reputed to be a temple site because of the granite shafts lying there, and in 1957 A. H. S. Megaw of the Department of Antiquities opened two intersecting lines of trial trenches to establish the nature of the remains¹. They revealed a fortress with a keep, an outer wall and a ditch, and J. S. Last assisted¹. Reused columns were built horizontally into the walls, and two trenches exposed towers of different plans on the outer wall¹. A sounding in the keep's inner courtyard indicated that it had been cleared to bedrock before construction, and tests in the outer ward found earlier buildings, among them a mosaic floor of sixth-century style cut by a keep wall¹.

Campaigns followed in 1958 and 1959^2,3. The 1958 work exposed almost half of the outer wall and central keep, with fourth-century BCE sherds among the earliest finds². The 1959 campaign cleared nearly three-quarters of the five-towered keep, traced the outer wall around almost its whole perimeter, and uncovered the lower stairs, a feature interpreted as a steam-bath boiler room, and a corbel decorated with a Gorgon head³. According to the report, pottery and other objects lay on the cleared floor in the state in which they had been left at the earthquake of 1222³.

Megaw's 1957 report suggested that the castle may have formed part of the Byzantine response to the Arab raids of the mid-seventh century, and associated its destruction with the earthquake of 1222¹. The 1959 notice proposed that it was built just after the Arabs withdrew from Cyprus in 656³. Catling's memoir of Megaw says that he first identified the fortress as the Paphian phrou(r)ion and that later work showed it to be an early Lusignan castle⁴. John Rosser's report on his separate excavations of 1981 to 1983 dates the construction to no earlier than the late twelfth century⁵.