This Week in Cypriot Archaeology: 31 August–6 September 2026

An Italian team closed its 2026 season at a Middle Bronze Age hilltop near Erimi with the full plan of a building of about 250 m² and a threshold scored with a senet-type game board. A Limassol tourism body announced AI-made 3D scenes for Kourion, a Nicosia museum closed after storm damage to its power supply, and the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation set a date to launch the book of its exhibition Cyprus Insula.

Map of Cyprus

This week's stories

• Fieldwork
• Sites and museums
• Ground above 200, 500, 1,000 m

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50 km

Sites on this map

1. 1Erimi-Laonin tou Porakou
2. 2Kourion
3. 3Polis Chrysochous
4. 4Nicosia

Fieldwork

A stone threshold scored with what may be a senet board came to light this summer at Erimi-Laonin tou Porakou, the Middle Bronze Age hilltop settlement in the Kouris valley north of Erimi. The Department of Antiquities announced on 1 September that the Italian mission of the University of Siena, directed by Luca Bombardieri, had worked there from 27 July to 21 August. The dressed-stone threshold leads from a central courtyard into Unit 6, the one room of the eastern wing open to it; the Department says the rows of small hollows cut into it fit a standard board of the senet type. Boards of this game are also cut into the bedrock beside the tombs at Dhenia. The same room holds a deep underground deposit of about 2.80 m³.

The room belongs to the Central Building, a complex of about 250 m² with massive outer walls, now exposed in full south of the textile workshop dug in earlier seasons. An alley on the east–west line gives onto a narrow vestibule with two doorways, which the excavators read as a dog-leg entrance to the courtyard, and three rooms line each side. Beneath the southern wing lie the heavy walls of an older building set on another alignment, partly reused for a staircase that may have led to an upper floor. To the east the team found an open area with rows of postholes, probably from light timber structures, and at least one probable house. In the cemetery south of the settlement, three chamber tombs (T2656–T2658) entered through vertical shafts held multiple burials, which the Department places in the community's last phase at the end of the Middle Bronze Age; the largest, T2656, has a bench along its back wall and a passage into a second chamber. The settlement was lived in from about 1960 BCE until shortly before 1650 BCE.

Sites and museums

The Limassol District Tourism Development and Promotion Company announced on 5 September a digital project for ancient Kourion, supported by the Deputy Ministry of Tourism. It plans 3D reconstructions of the monuments at their height and scenes animated with artificial intelligence, among them athletic contests in the stadium, for the less-visited monuments as well as the best-known ones. The stadium, west of the city, was built in the mid-2nd century CE with seats for about 6,000 spectators.

The Municipality of Polis Chrysochous said on 4 September that its Maritime and Cultural Museum had 4,517 visitors in its first year, many of them families and school students. Across four rooms it tells the story of seafaring around Cyprus and in the wider Mediterranean, with the Akamas in focus, through old maps, photographs, video, games and virtual and augmented reality.

In Nicosia, the Department of Antiquities closed the Ethnological Museum in the House of Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios from 1 September, after recent bad weather left it with problems in its electricity supply. A reopening date is to follow.

Books

The Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation announced on 4 September that it will launch Cyprus Insula: History, Memory, Reality, the book of its exhibition of the same name, on 17 September in Nicosia. Edited by Yiannis Toumazis and Demetra Ignatiou, the volume illustrates and discusses the show's more than 200 exhibits, from archaeological finds to contemporary art, and adds twelve original essays; the archaeologist Jennifer M. Webb is among the authors. The archaeologist and art historian Anna Marangou and Athanasios Vionis, Associate Professor of Byzantine and post-Byzantine archaeology at the University of Cyprus, will present it in English at the Foundation.