At the landward end of the bronze age site
is a six storey apartment hotel;
right a broad sandy beach with amenities,
left, behind palms, cypresses and olives,
another hotel, vast as a cruise ship,
hiding the property development signs
in Russian and Chinese on the main road.
A peloton of young German students,
when we arrive, is being lectured
at the entrance to the museum –
an architect-designed, circular space,
subtly engineered into the sandstone,
with a green dome and copper plated doors.
A Cypriot copper oxhide ingot
is one of the exhibits. They were standard
in weight – and shaped always like a stretched
animal skin – throughout the eastern sea.
Precursors of the fictional Ulysses,
exiles, refugees from Mycenae
found this safe haven – with its thirty foot
sandstone cliffs and a fresh water spring
and its crow’s nest view of the sea, north to Troy,
south to Egypt, west to the Hesperides –
three thousand years ago. They survived pirates,
a fire, built defensive walls, stone houses,
but stayed for only two generations
before Hellenising the island,
exploiting its copper.
By David Selzer