Xeros valley: the Settled and Sacred Landscapes of Cyprus project (University of Cyprus)

Trenches dug in July 2025 south and east of the ruined chapel called the martyrion at Kophinou-Agios Herakleios showed a single-aisled barrel-vaulted medieval church standing over an earlier three-aisled basilica, probably of the early 7th century¹. The Settled and Sacred Landscapes of Cyprus project (SeSaLaC), run by the University of Cyprus, conducted its field project in the Xeros valley between 2014 and 2020².

Athanasios Vionis, Giorgos Papantoniou and Doria Nicolaou were named as the project's codirectors in 2023³. It set out to identify, map and interpret traces of human activity in the valley from early prehistory to early modern times, and the interaction of secular and religious space with the natural environment². Survey walked north-south transects 150 m wide at 150 m intervals, with concentrations revisited in 25 by 25 m grids, and was combined with geophysical prospection, geoarchaeology, digital humanities and anthropology². Athos Agapiou tested automated detection of surface ceramics from UAV imagery in two survey areas². Area 20 gave a multi-period assemblage, mostly dated by the authors to the Early Middle Bronze Age, with medieval to early modern glazed wares; Area 6 is a single-period Late Antique site². A 2023 synthesis says SeSaLaC identified a workshop 2 km north-east of Kofinou that made domestic pottery and roof tiles through the sixth and seventh centuries³.

Excavation began in 2024 at Kophinou-Agios Herakleios¹. The 1 to 31 July 2025 season was directed by Vionis and Nicolaou, with the Archaeological Summer Field School of the University of Cyprus as partner and a permit from the Department of Antiquities¹. Two parallel walls south of the martyrion probably form the basilica narthex; a skeleton lay in situ in an early Byzantine stone larnax against the outer south wall, part of an organised cemetery around the basilica¹. A hearth and mortar base show later Late Medieval use, and collapse-layer ceramics date from the late 14th to the mid 16th century¹. The Department's announcement presents the cemetery as documented for the first time in Cyprus around a basilica in the countryside¹.

A trial trench at Menogeia-Limnes, at a suspected pottery workshop of the 5th to 7th century AD, gave wasters, unfired clay, combustion residues, charcoal, glass and metal fragments, and a circular notch cut in bedrock probably near a kiln¹.