Cyprus’ Roman Mosaics Dazzling Archeologists and Island Tourists

Archeologists have unearthed 100 exquisite mosaic floors of mythological and geometric design from the glory years of Paphos as a rich Roman trading port, and may find as many more.

British soldiers discovered the first floor, depicting Hercules about to attack a lion, while digging an air raid shelter in 1942. They covered it up again.

The mosaics, made of thumbnail-sized cubes of sawed stone called tesserae, decorated wealthy Cypriot homes when Paphos was the capital of the eastern Mediterranean island more than 2,000 years ago.

“They were the ancient equivalent of a fitted carpet, and a status symbol” of the rich “in the rooms where they entertained,” said Demetrios Michaelides, the government archeological officer in charge of the 950,000-square-yard site.”

He said in an interview there may be “more than another 100 mosaics on the site.”

A second chance find 20 years after the soldiers uncovered Hercules and the lion led to systematic digging by archeologists.

They unearthed a mansion filled with mosaics and called it the House of Dionysus because the god of wine and revelry was prominent in the decorations.

Three other mansions with spectacular mosaic floors have been found in recent years, one so lavish it eventually was identified as the palace of the Roman governor.

“It’s surprising to find a highly developed mosaic art in Cyprus at a point when it was really one of the empire’s provincial backwaters,” said Christina Kondoleon, professor of art at Williams College of Williamstown, Mass., who is publishing a book on the discoveries.

“The designs are lively and creative. . . . Mosaicists copied each other and used pattern books, but these are often original, with a very wide color range,” she said in a telephone interview.

Naturalistic figures are surrounded by borders in floral and geometric designs that are based on classical architecture and intended to give a three-dimensional effect.

Scholars agree the mosaics were made of local stone by craftsmen influenced by the sophisticated styles of mosaic workshops in Antioch on the coast of nearby Syria.

Michaelides said many were laid during a period of great prosperity in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries.

One of the finest shows Orpheus, a mythological musician whose playing was said to tame wild beasts, seated on a rock performing with his lyre for an audience of animals--a tiger, leopard, deer and several others.

It measures 13 1/2 feet by 16 feet, 4 inches. The colors are a subtle range of grays, pinks and browns.

A later series, again of Dionysus and his followers in luminous colored robes, dates from the middle of the 4th Century, when Christianity was gaining adherents in Cyprus.

Kondoleon said the Dionysus mosaics “are certainly making an anti-Christian statement, reasserting the old pagan values.”

The Paphos mosaics have become the island’s biggest tourist resource, attracting more than 250,000 visitors a year, but it will be years before all are on show.

Michaelides said the “difficulties and expense of conserving and displaying mosaics mean you can’t go out and dig one up whenever you want.”

Gauze and sacking are glued to a mosaic to keep the tesserae in place, then it is cut out of the ground.

Last summer, the Orpheus mosaic was lifted in one piece by experts from the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, who rolled it around a wooden drum to help keep it intact.

“Usually you cut the mosaic up in panels on the site and reassemble it later, but this way there’s less danger of damaging it,” Nicholas Stanley Price, the archeologist who supervised the operation, said.

He said the team will return this spring to unroll the mosaic and place it on a special epoxy resin base to reduce humidity before it goes on display.