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What is this life, the poet asked, if full of care, we have no time to stop and stare. It is, I suppose, one of the advantages of being a pensioner that one does – or should – have more time to stop and stare. Certainly that was what one old Cypriot was doing late last year as he passed a building site.
It is a well known fact that building sites have enormous fascination for the male sex, whether small boys enamoured of the mighty yellow diggers and pounders, or bigger boys whose motives may not be so easily classified. Quite what the pensioner was hoping to see I do not know, but as his eye wandered leisurely over the disturbed earth of the site, he spotted a piece of white stone that looked too smooth and strangely shaped to be natural.
Ignoring whatever barriers Cypriot workmen erect around their sites, he wandered over and peered at the stone. It took a while for his brain to make sense of the pattern he was looking at, but abruptly it made sense: he was staring at a woman’s elbow!
He raked away at the loose soil and within moments had confirmed his guess by exposing an upper arm and shoulder. The workmen who had gathered round by then joined in and very soon they had uncovered the statue of a beautiful but naked woman.
Unfortunately her head is missing, but apart from that she is “the best preserved we have found in Paphos,” according to Eustathios Raptou, the archaeological director of the Paphos region. As the area is known to be close to – or even part of – the Roman necropolis, he adds, “It cannot be excluded that the statue originally stood above an important Roman tomb.”
The discovery has, no doubt, aroused feelings of envy in the breast of Professor Richard Green of Sydney University who has recently begun excavating on Fabrica Hill, not far away. Mind you, although it may take longer, he is likely to find something just as beautiful and significant, for he and his team are working on the theatre of Paphos, which was the largest in Cyprus. Estimated to hold 8,000 spectators, the theatre formed a semicircle 240 feet in diameter. It is likely to be the most exciting excavation on Cyprus for some years.
July 2003
