Győző Vörös

Győző Vörös proposed that a Ptolemaic temple of Aphrodite-Arsinoe-Isis stood on Fanari Hill at Nea Paphos, on the strength of columns his Hungarian team recorded there in 2003. A book on Christianity in northern Egypt calls him "the archaeologist and Egyptologist" who led the Hungarian Expedition at Taposiris Magna⁶; his two monographs on the site appeared in 2001 and 2004^3,4.

In 2003 a Hungarian team under his direction recorded 27 previously unrecorded granite columns at Nea Paphos, continuing the British column survey published in 2002. He divided the columns into a group of 710 cm and a group of 470 cm, and proposed that all came from one quarry in the Troad and belonged to one Hellenistic building, not the Roman Agora¹. He linked them to a Corinthian peripteros on Fanari Hill, built under Ptolemy II and dedicated to Aphrodite-Arsinoe-Isis, by analogy with Taposiris Magna and the Serapeum at Alexandria, and drew on the accounts of travellers from 1483 to 1738 and on a painting by Skippe of about 1760¹. He published the argument as "The lighthouse hill temple of Nea Paphos" in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus for 2006 (pp. 295-312)⁵.

The Paphos Agora Project volume of 2020 judges that "many of the interpretations offered by the Hungarian archaeologist were exaggerated", though a temple on the hill is "quite probable". It calls his reconstruction and surveys "a strong basis" that needs "fundamental deconstruction and reformulation from scratch"¹. The British team had argued for Roman dates for the columns, while G. Papantoniou accepts a Hellenistic one¹.