Theatre architecture in Cyprus: The evidence from the excavations of the Nea Paphos theatre

Craig Barker of the University of Sydney presents the results of nineteen excavation seasons by the Paphos Theatre Archaeological Project at the ancient theatre on Fabrika Hill in Nea Paphos, inaugurated by Richard Green in 1995. Barker outlines six main architectural phases spanning six and a half centuries, from the foundation of Nea Paphos in the late fourth or early third century BC to the late fourth-century AD earthquakes, and places the building within the surrounding Theatre Quarter and alongside the other Roman theatres of Cyprus.

Barker argues that the theatre was established at the end of the fourth or very beginning of the third century BC, predating the regular urban grid of Nea Paphos, as shown by its south-by-southwest orientation towards the harbour and late fourth- or early third-century BC lettering carved into the upper cavea. Because Fabrika Hill lacked sufficient natural bedrock on its eastern and western flanks, the builders used earthen embankments behind retaining walls, topped with plastered limestone seats. A mid-second-century BC Alexandrian phase introduced a stone stage building with a painted triglyph and metope frieze, attested alongside a lost statue base of the Dionysiac guild of artists, and a rock-cut Charonian tunnel beneath the orchestra, the only example known in Cyprus. Following the earthquake of 15 or 17 BC, an Augustan rebuilding reinforced the collapsed western analemma wall.

The theatre reached its greatest extent in the mid-second century AD under the Antonines, seating 8,000 to 8,500 spectators and measuring nearly 90 metres across. A large marble inscription honours Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius for the gifts of the barrel-vaulted parodoi, painted with garlanded colonnades, and the marble-faced stage building with its imperial statues. Barker shows how this Antonine expansion abutted an earlier, differently aligned nymphaeum to the south, which faced a colonnaded street over eight metres wide running toward the northeastern city gate and the pilgrim road to Palaepaphos. Mapping reused Troad granite columns across Paphos, he proposes that this street was the decumanus maximus and met the cardo maximus at the western corner of the theatre.

Under the Severans, postholes around the orchestra and the reuse of the Antonine inscription as a threshold over a coin of Caracalla indicate a conversion into an arena. A later third-century waterproof containment wall and drainage pipes show that the orchestra was flooded for aquatic spectacles until its destruction in the late fourth century AD. Barker concludes by comparing the chronology and scale of the Paphos theatre with those at Soloi, Salamis and Kourion. In the discussion afterwards, he addresses the dismantling of the Antonine stage, the Ptolemaic terminology of the early phases, medieval structures on the hill, and earlier Cypriot theatrical traditions.