In 1962, while working in his field, a resident of Paphos made an unexpected discovery. He discovered the Paphos mosaics, which became one of the most valuable attractions of Cyprus. They have been included in the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1980, are part of the Kato Paphos Archaeological Park and are considered one of the best preserved in the entire Eastern Mediterranean.
Initially, mosaics were the decor of a private villa. They date back to the beginning of the 4th century; coins found here from the time of Emperor Licinius, who ruled the eastern part of the Roman Empire from 313 to 324, helped establish this. The villa was probably destroyed by an earthquake in the 360s.
Polish archaeologist Wiktor Dashevsky, who examined the mosaics in the 1980s, called the ruined building the "Villa of Aeon" because one of the mosaics depicts the deity of time in the center. Did the author of these paintings want to convey some hidden meaning to his contemporaries and descendants? Or maybe he encrypted some kind of message in his mosaics? Immediately after the discovery of the mosaics, theories about their meaning arose. Dashevsky suggested that hidden in the mosaics was a religious manifesto of a closed circle of educated pagans of Paphos. The purpose of the manifesto was to revive traditional religion, which was in crisis due to the spread of Christianity. At the center of this religious system was Dionysus as the supreme and saving deity. However, this theory is refuted by the fact that only two scenes involving Dionysus have survived: “the first bath of Dionysus” and “the triumph of Dionysus.”
The second theory, put forward by the French scientist Janin Balti, says that the mosaics in an allegorical form show the journey of the soul through the world of matter, as it was imagined by the followers of Neoplatonism.
Photo: xronografos.com
A third version of the interpretation of the mosaics was recently presented by Professor of the Cyprus Open University Yorgos Deliyannakis. In his opinion, an allegorical depiction of anything or an ideological manifestation was not the goal of the customer or creator. In his opinion, the subjects of the mosaics are not related to each other at all and simply depict popular stories of that era and culture.
For example, the central one is a competition between Cassiopeia and the Nereids. The judge of female beauty here is Eon. This interpretation of the myth of Cassiopeia is unknown from other sources; it has come down to us in only two mosaics - from Apamea (modern Türkiye) and Palmyra (modern Syria). This suggests that such a variation of the myth was local. “The central image refers to a story related to the local myths of the Syrian-Palestinian region, with which Cyprus has been closely associated for many years,” says the scientist. He also emphasizes that the room with mosaics was used as a dining room for the owners of the house, and not as a sacred space. Based on this, we must consider their meaning. “I wouldn’t give the images a deep philosophical meaning. We are dealing with a compilation of Greek and Levantine non-Greek mythological traditions,” the researcher is confident.
The mosaics do not show any polemics with Christianity, which at the beginning of the 4th century was not yet so popular in Cyprus.
All this suggests that very often many, even scientists, wishful thinking.
This article was first published in the Cyprus Herald on September 26, 2019. Some information may be out of date.
