Settled and Sacred Landscapes in the Xeros River Valley

This short documentary, presented primarily in Greek with brief visitor comments in English, presents the fieldwork and public outreach of two collaborative projects hosted by the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus: UnSaLa-CY and Settled and Sacred Landscapes of Cyprus (SeSaLaC). Since 2014, the field team has conducted systematic archaeological surface survey across the rural valley of the Xeros River in the Larnaca district, examining how settlements and sacred places shifted from prehistory to the modern era.

The film begins with the historical background of the valley and its repeated role as a place of refuge: for Syrian saints in the Byzantine period, for Greek Cypriot refugees displaced from the occupied north after the Turkish invasion of 1974 who settled at Kofinou, and for contemporary asylum seekers hosted at the Kofinou reception centre. At the tenth-century church at Kofinou, built over a late sixth- or early seventh-century three-aisled early Christian basilica excavated by Eleni Prokopiou for the Department of Antiquities, the university survey team identified a surrounding early Byzantine agricultural village covering 10 to 13 hectares, with an estimated 1,000 to 1,300 inhabitants. After the sixteenth-century Ottoman conquest, families gradually moved to the site of the later Turkish Cypriot sector of Kofinou. Two hundred metres south of the church lies a rock-cut necropolis founded in the Cypro-Archaic and Cypro-Classical periods. Using GIS spatial analysis of sanctuaries and pottery from the Xeros valley, the project argues that the valley belonged to the territory of the city-kingdom of Amathus, extending as far as Stavrovouni, rather than to Idalion or Kition.

At Alaminos, the documentary examines a fifteenth- to sixteenth-century medieval tower of three storeys, interpreted as a feudal manor house where a lord or bailiff oversaw the local population and stored agricultural produce and taxes on the ground floor. Immediately east of the tower, the survey defined the boundaries of a large Early and Middle Bronze Age settlement, partly excavated earlier by Georgios Georgiou.

The final section covers public and community archaeology: a photography exhibition by Adamos Papantoniou with the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation and the Huntington's Disease Association of Cyprus, 3D digital recording of the medieval church of Panagia Astathkiotissa at Agios Theodoros (inaccessible to Greek Cypriots during the intercommunal troubles of 1964 to 1974 and bearing dated graffiti left by Turkish Cypriot shepherds), and community open days in Kofinou, Alaminos and Agios Theodoros using a mobile touring application and active-learning survey exercises for children.