Makronissos Tombs

The Makronissos tombs are a cemetery of nineteen rock-cut chamber tombs on the Makronissos peninsula west of Ayia Napa, in the south-east of Cyprus [1, p. 174]. Beside them lie a small open-air sanctuary and part of an ancient quarry [2; 3]. The sanctuary is the oldest part of the site, with offerings of the Cypro-Classical period [4]. The tombs were cut in the Hellenistic period, were used most heavily in the later 1st century BC, and some were opened again for burials as late as the 4th or 5th century AD [5, p. 28; 1, p. 174]. The Department of Antiquities excavated the cemetery in the winter of 1989 to 1990, and the tombs are now an open archaeological site [2].

The promontory

Makronissos, the "long island", is a peninsula on the coast [1, p. 174], although it is sometimes called an island [5, p. 22]. The cemetery lies at the edge of the sea, within the municipality of Ayia Napa in Famagusta District [2]. The tombs are cut into the bedrock of the promontory and face east or south-east [1, p. 174]. The same stone was cut in the quarry next to the cemetery [2].

Looting and excavation

The tombs were known long before anyone excavated them. According to the Municipality of Agia Napa they "have been the target of illegal digging since 1872" [2], and when the archaeologists reached them every tomb had already been looted and disturbed [6]. Who dug here in the 19th century is not recorded in the published accounts.

The first scientific record of the site came from the archaeological survey of the Ayia Napa region in 1974, when a few offerings from the sanctuary were collected [2]. Between November 1989 and early January 1990 the Department of Antiquities, with funding from the Municipality of Agia Napa, excavated the cemetery under Sophocles Hadjisavvas [2; 1, p. 174; 4]. The excavators cleared all nineteen tombs, the sanctuary to the east of the burial ground, and part of the quarry beside it [2; 3]. Hadjisavvas published the excavation in 1997, together with a study of the archaeology of the Ayia Napa region and an appendix on the clay coffins by Danielle A. Parks, M. Aviam and E. J. Stern [7; 8].

The tombs

The tombs follow one plan with small variations. A rectangular dromos (entrance passage) cut as a flight of steps leads down to a rectangular stomion (doorway), which was closed with one large slab of stone or two smaller ones [6]. Beyond it lies the chamber. Most chambers are almost identical: a rectangular trench runs down the middle, slightly lower than the floor of the dromos, and a bench for a burial is cut along each of the three sides [6].

Anne Marie Carstens, who surveyed the chamber tombs of Cyprus, counts seventeen of the nineteen as cross-shaped tombs and describes them as a homogeneous group: "A rectangular stepped dromos leads to a rectangular stomion, originally closed by a door slab. The typical cross-shaped chamber is provided with alcoves on three sides. In some cases the benches in these alcoves have fittings in the shape of grooves, for wooden, terra-cotta, or stone sarcophagi" [1, pp. 147–148]. A few tombs vary the plan. Some have a loculus, a narrow burial recess, cut on the long axis of the tomb opposite the entrance, and one has four benches at the sides and one opposite the entrance, room for five burials [6].

The quarry next to the cemetery stayed in use after the tombs were cut, and the work damaged some of them [2]. Elsewhere the rock roofs of chambers have fallen in, so that their plan can now be seen from above.

Burials and grave goods

The dead were laid in clay sarcophagi, each covered originally with three flat tiles [6; 2]. Fragments of a different kind of terracotta coffin came from several of the tombs. Parks, Aviam and Stern suggested that this type was made in northern Galilee or in Cilicia [1, p. 174; 8]. Parks later studied about fifty coffins of the group found in Cyprus and dated them between about AD 150 and 350, although some may have been made as early as the 1st century AD. Clay analyses point to manufacture somewhere around the Bay of İskenderun, and the coffins are found in Smooth Cilicia, north-western Syria and Cyprus. On the island they cluster along the east coast, at Salamis, Famagusta, Ayia Napa-Makronissos and Kition among other places [5, p. 176].

Pyres were found on the surface beside the dromoi. The excavator took them as evidence that the people buried here followed Greek burial customs [6].

Although robbers had taken most of the contents, the pottery left in the tombs dates them. John Lund, in his study of the Hellenistic and Roman pottery of Cyprus, writes that the finds from the tombs "seem to reflect a degree of prosperity" [5, p. 22]. The dated pieces he discusses include the following [5, pp. 28, 86, 117, 256].

A piece in the Drakopoulos collection of a kind found at this site. It does not come from the site.

• Fusiform UnguentariumHellenistic · 325–150 BCDrakopoulos collection

Dates of use

The excavation report remains the full account of the dating, and the summaries of it do not quite agree. Carstens gives two statements. In one she dates the use of the cemetery from the Early Hellenistic period to the 2nd century AD, and says that at least six tombs were used until the 4th or 5th century AD [1, p. 174]. In another she writes that "the earliest tombs at Makronisos were made in the 2nd century BC" [1, p. 148]. The dated pottery fits the later start better: the earliest groups that Lund lists belong to the second half of the 2nd century BC [5, p. 86]. We therefore date the first tombs to the Hellenistic period, perhaps not before the 2nd century BC.

Lund's study of the fine wares shows the peak of burial in the second half of the 1st century BC and a steep fall in the second half of the 1st century AD [5, p. 28]. The imported coffins, a type of the 2nd to 4th centuries AD, show that some burials continued after the fine wares stop, and the tombs were reused once more in Late Antiquity [5, pp. 28, 176].

Phases

1. SanctuaryCypro-Classical, 5th to 4th century BC

   Terracotta and limestone figurines in a small open enclosure; very little earlier material.

2. First tombsHellenistic, perhaps not before the 2nd century BC

   Chamber tombs with stepped dromoi cut into the promontory; the earliest dated finds belong to the later 2nd century BC.

3. Main use1st century BC to 1st century AD

   Most of the fine pottery dates from the second half of the 1st century BC; it falls off steeply after the mid-1st century AD.

4. Roman burials2nd century AD and later

   No fine ware later than about AD 120 to 150, but imported clay coffins of a type dated about AD 150 to 350.

5. Late reuse4th to 5th century AD

   At least six tombs are used again in Late Antiquity.

The sanctuary and the quarry

The sanctuary lies to the east of the burial ground [2]. It is a simple rectangular enclosure of large irregular blocks [2; 3], open at one end and about 4 m wide, with no other architecture [4]. Its finds include a fragment of a finely carved limestone figurine and fragments of other terracotta and limestone figurines. All of this material appears to be Cypro-Classical, and there is very little of the Cypro-Archaic period, which is usual for this corner of the island, where Cypro-Geometric and Cypro-Archaic sites are rare [4]. We do not know which deity was worshipped here.

The sanctuary is older than the tombs, and the published summaries do not say whether it was still visited when the first tombs were cut. A similar small sanctuary on the coastal heights of Koutsopetria, near Pyla, some 22 km to the west, was probably of the same simple kind [4].

Pieces in the Drakopoulos collection of kinds found at this site. None of them comes from the site.

• Limestone Head of a Votary with a WreathClassical · 475–400 BCDrakopoulos collection
• Small Terracotta Head of a Man with Ringed EyesArchaic II · 600–300 BCDrakopoulos collection

The quarry adjoins the cemetery [2]. Its date is not given in the published summaries; it cut into some of the tombs, so at least part of the quarrying is later than they are [2].

Tombs of the same plan in eastern Cyprus

The cross-shaped chamber with an alcove in each arm is, in Carstens's words, typical "from the Early Hellenistic period onwards" of two cemeteries in particular: Makronissos and the necropolis of Mağara Tepeşi at Athienou [1, p. 147]. At Athienou-Mağara Tepeşi three almost identical tombs of the early Hellenistic period have stepped dromoi and a single cross-shaped chamber with three benches cut in the arms of the cross [1, p. 147]. The type is concentrated in the east of the island, where whole cemeteries, or large parts of them, were cut to this plan [1, p. 148].

Makronissos was not the only burial ground of its time near Ayia Napa. The survey of the coast east and west of the town found six Hellenistic sites, settlements and cemeteries, against one of the Classical period [5, p. 22], and thirteen Roman sites, including settlements, cemeteries, country houses and a reservoir with an aqueduct [5, p. 28]. In the 1870s Luigi Palma di Cesnola described another necropolis with many terracotta coffins "some ten minutes east of" Ayia Napa, towards Cape Greco [5, pp. 176–177].

Visiting

The tombs are a fenced archaeological site open to visitors, beside the coast road west of Ayia Napa. Entry is free [3]. A Department of Antiquities panel at the site describes the tombs in Greek and English [6]. Visitors can see the open dromoi and several chambers with their benches and central trenches. A clay sarcophagus from the cemetery is shown in the Thalassa Municipal Museum of the Sea in Ayia Napa.