THE PROMONTORY

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.

 

 

 

ChinesecopperEgyptHellenisingHesperidesMycenaeoxhide ingotRussianTroyUlysses