Tombs of the Kings, Paphos

Interesting facts

The name is doubly misleading: by the time these tombs were cut, the old city-kingdoms of Cyprus had already ceased to exist.

The excavator has linked Tomb 8 to the Ptolemaic royal house, possibly the burial of the last king of Cyprus, who killed himself when Rome took the island.

Some tombs echo the cemeteries of Ptolemaic Alexandria; one stands as a massive free block in a rock-cut court, recalling the Mustafa Pasha necropolis there.

A tomb complex found in 1983 in the northern part of the site, unique in Cyprus, is reached by a stepped passage about 20 metres long and was richly stuccoed.

The first digging here was done in 1870 by Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the American consul and a notorious hunter of Cypriot antiquities.

The first scientifically supervised excavation came only in 1915, led by Menelaos Markides, curator of the Cyprus Museum.

From 1937 the larger tombs were cleared with the help of prisoners; the work stopped during the Second World War and resumed from 1945 to 1952.

Carved crosses suggest early Christians reused some chambers, and a medieval pottery kiln and a walled-in courtyard show that one tomb later served as a dwelling.

Finds include gold jewellery, gold myrtle leaves, an ivory box and coins of the 2nd century BC, although robbers had emptied many tombs long before.

Each family seems to have owned its own burial plot, and offerings such as birds, eggs and fruit were burned on pyres for the dead.

Why it is worth it

The Tombs of the Kings is a large necropolis on the coast just north of Paphos harbour, where the dead of Hellenistic and Roman Paphos were buried in chambers cut out of the solid rock. Despite the name, no kings lie here. The tombs belonged to the town's aristocracy and high officials, and the grandeur of the largest of them gave the site its name. They were used from the 4th century BC until the 3rd century AD, when Paphos was the capital of Cyprus under Ptolemaic and then Roman rule.

What makes the site remarkable is that many of the tombs imitate the houses of the living. The finest have been sunk into the bedrock around an open central court, surrounded on all sides by a peristyle of Doric columns carved from the rock itself, with doorways leading to burial chambers and niches for the dead. Some walls kept traces of painted plaster. Seen from the edges of these sunken courtyards, they resemble small underground villas open to the sky, a few hundred metres from the sea.

Travellers described the tombs from the 18th century onward, but systematic excavation began only in 1977 under the Cypriot archaeologist Sophocles Hadjisavvas and continued into the 1980s. The finds, among them Rhodian amphorae used to date the burials, have become an important reference for Hellenistic and early Roman archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean, and some tombs have been linked to burials connected with the Ptolemaic dynasty. Together with the rest of ancient Paphos, the site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980. Paphos, on the southwestern coast of Cyprus, is associated in Greek myth with Aphrodite, said to have risen from the sea nearby.

Getting there

The necropolis lies about 2 km north of Paphos harbour, on the edge of the town. The nearest airport is Paphos International Airport (PFO), about 10 km away.

Tombs of the Kings, Paphos

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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