The UnSaLa-CY Project on the Sacred Topography of Cyprus

Giorgos Papantoniou presents the UnSaLa-CY research project on Cypriot sacred topography, co-directed with Athanasios K. Vionis at the University of Cyprus. Given in Greek, the talk outlines how the project studies the island's sacred sites diachronically from the Late Bronze Age to Late Antiquity.

Papantoniou first traces the origins of the wider UnSaLa Mediterranean research network, formed by Trinity College Dublin, the Institute for Mediterranean Studies in Crete and the University of Cyprus, and lists the team of specialists working in collaboration with the Settled and Sacred Landscapes of Cyprus (SeSaLaC) project in the Xeros River valley.

The lecture then sets out the theoretical framework. While scholarship has often classified Cypriot sanctuaries by deity or cult type in isolation from their surroundings, UnSaLa-CY examines their spatial and socio-political context. Papantoniou notes a major change between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age: the appearance of public extra-urban sanctuaries outside urban boundaries. Their proliferation from the Cypro-Archaic period relates to the consolidation of the Cypriot city-kingdoms. Monumental limestone sculpture depicting officials and rulers, including figures with Egyptianizing crowns or diadems, comes largely from these rural sanctuaries and projected royal and aristocratic authority over territory, agricultural land and copper sources.

Under Ptolemaic rule in the Hellenistic period and after the abolition of the city-kingdoms, the state gradually neglected these territorial sanctuaries. By the Roman period most had gone out of use; those that survived were either minor rural shrines or great sanctuaries of Bronze Age origin such as Palaepaphos, whose conical cult image remained an emblem on Roman coins until the 3rd century AD, alongside monumental Greco-Roman temples at urban centres like Amathus and Kourion. After the earthquakes of the 4th century AD, provincial governors and city councils chose not to rebuild the destroyed pagan temples. In the 5th to 7th centuries AD, bishops established cathedrals and basilicas in the cities and across the countryside, including the basilica investigated by SeSaLaC beneath the church of Panagia at Kofinou in the Xeros valley. The talk concludes with the project's GIS spatial analyses, seven work packages and conference series.