Soli: the Franco-Canadian mission of Universite Laval (1964–1974)

Digging at Soli between 1964 and 1974 found the first Geometric necropolis at Soloi itself, a Roman colonnaded street leading to an agora, two Early Christian basilicas one above the other, and a terrace on the acropolis that the excavators read as a Hellenistic palace^1,2,3,4. The work was done by a mission of the Université Laval directed by Jean des Gagniers^4,5.

Choosing the site

The Director of the Department of Antiquities entrusted the site to the Laval mission for systematic excavation⁵. Soloi was chosen because the earlier Swedish work had been reconnaissance, with only the Cholades temples and the theatre methodically excavated and published⁵. A first campaign in the summer of 1964 took place in troubled conditions and allowed only very limited soundings^5,6. Spring campaigns followed from 1965 to 1974, with a second, autumn campaign in 1973^4,7.

Des Gagniers directed throughout. Lilly Kahil was responsible for the tombs and the acropolis, René Ginouvès for the lower town and V. Tran Tam Tinh for the basilica^4,8,9. The lower town was explored in 5 m trial squares meant to fit an orthogonal frame covering the whole site^5,7. A Laval excavation house and workshop was begun in the autumn of 1968 so that the pottery from the necropolis could be stored and studied¹⁰.

The tombs

In 1965 the mission dug eight rock-cut tombs (I to VIII) on the hill south-east of the acropolis; Tomb VI was by far the richest⁵. They were chamber tombs with a dromos, mostly Cypro-Geometric III to Cypro-Archaic; many had been looted and a few, among them T. IX and T. X, were intact^5,8. Tomb VI had a circular chamber about 4 m across with superimposed burials, more than a hundred vases and iron fibulae and daggers; des Gagniers saw three periods of use^5,7. An Archaic oenochoe from it, T VI 76, carries an incised syllabic inscription that Olivier Masson read as the name Themistos⁵.

T. IX opened off the wide dromos of T. VI and held about a hundred objects in three burial layers, from late Cypro-Geometric to late Cypro-Archaic⁸. T. XI, intact in 1967, held two skeletons with about thirty offerings, among them a bronze mirror, gold lion-head earrings, an Egyptian faience statuette and three polychrome jugs with plastic figures of two men; two Attic lekythoi in the blocking gave a fourth-century terminus post quem¹¹. The dromos of T. XII, almost entirely looted, held the skeletons of a young bovid with the sacrificial knife and a smaller animal, perhaps a lamb¹¹.

Digging in lot 96, north-east of the theatre, resumed the exploration of the necropolis in 1969 and found the first Geometric tombs at Soloi¹. Des Gagniers wrote that the find raised the date of Soloi by about 200 years, to the ninth century BC⁷. In 1970 the mission excavated eight tombs there, T. VII to T. XIV, and pits A and B; the best find was a fragmentary cup in Black-on-Red technique decorated with a fish². In 1971 necropolis digging stopped because of the quantity of material, which Kahil was preparing for publication¹².

The lower town and the basilica

The lower town, north of the theatre, had a stratigraphy 5 or 6 m deep. It yielded sixth-century mud-brick houses on stone foundations, an ashlar "classical building" that the excavators thought could have been a public building, Hellenistic and Roman houses, and a Roman industrial complex with a glass workshop and a possible fullonica^7,8. A paved street with covered porticos and shops, reported as apparently the first great colonnaded street found in Cyprus, led west to a large paved esplanade identified as the agora; in 1971 it was followed for over 30 m^2,12. By 1974 more than 300 m2 of the agora's south-east corner had been cleared⁴. The published widths of the carriageway vary between 4.25 m and 4.95 m^2,7,12,13.

Against the agora's south retaining wall stood a U-shaped nymphaeum with a lower reservoir and a Corinthian order. An architrave inscription names an emperor M. Aur., read by the excavators as Caracalla or another of his dynasty, and the building was later used as a quarry^3,9. In the sector south of the lower-town trenches, a life-size bronze head, dated by the excavators to the second century AD, lay on the floor of a house found in 1971^7,12.

Clearance of an Early Christian basilica on a terrace north-east of the theatre began in 1966⁸. It proved to be two successive buildings. Basilica A was five-aisled and at least 46 m long, with a polychrome geometric mosaic; Basilica B had three aisles and three apses and measured 52.10 x 30 m, with an atrium carrying Diocletian-era inscriptions and a late Christian cemetery with sgraffito bowls^3,4. Des Gagniers dated the first basilica to the end of the fourth century from coins of Valens, Gratian and Theodosius in the sanctuary floor⁷. The 1972 report places Basilica B in the fifth century, while Nicolaou dates it to the sixth^9,14.

The acropolis terrace and the end of the work

In 1973 the mission began the first systematic exploration of the acropolis terrace in plot 366, gridded in 5 m squares, to test Westholm's hypothesis of a royal palace below the acropolis temple³. The excavators found thick-walled rooms, stucco and a stepped terrace, with pottery almost none later than 150 BC. In 1973 they said the identification as a palace could not yet be affirmed; the report on 1974 calls it a Hellenistic palace^3,4. In 1972 M. Giroux and James Carpenter of Kent State University had also collaborated on a survey of Bronze Age sites in the Soloi region⁹.

The spring campaign of 1974 ran from the end of March to May, and the autumn campaign was prevented by the Turkish invasion of 1974⁴. The stratigraphic material and the other finds of Soloi were carried off or lost in the turmoil that ravaged the island in the summer of 1974, as Karageorghis's chronicle puts it; where they are now is not recorded⁴. The bronze head, restored at the Antikenmuseum Basel, is exhibited in the Cyprus Museum⁷.

Hermary noted in 1986 that the excavations had been interrupted in 1974 and that the volume series Soloi. Dix campagnes de fouilles (1964–1974) was just beginning¹⁵. Volume 2 (1989) carries the lower town by Ginouvès, with a preface by Tran Tam Tinh¹⁶.