Khirokitia: Neolithic Houses and Early Village Life in Cyprus

Khirokitia, also spelled Choirokoitia, is a Neolithic village on a hillside above the Maroni River in southern Cyprus, about six kilometres from the coast between Limassol and Larnaca. Founded around 7000 BC, it was a closely packed settlement of round stone houses, enclosed by a massive wall, where a farming community of perhaps a few hundred people lived and buried their dead beneath the floors of their homes. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1998 as one of the most important prehistoric sites in the eastern Mediterranean, and beside the excavated village stand full-size reconstructions of its houses. On Day 20 of our Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus tour we visit Khirokitia on the way to Larnaca.

Khirokitia’s landscape and early village settlement

The village sits on the slope of a hill partly wrapped in a loop of the Maroni River, a position that gave its people water, fertile land on the valley floor and a natural defence on the river side. The hills around are dry, stony and covered in low scrub, with carob and olive trees in the valley below, and the sea is visible to the south on a clear day. It is a quiet, open landscape, and it is easy to understand why a farming community would have chosen it.

Khirokitia belongs to what archaeologists call the Aceramic, or pre-pottery, Neolithic: its people farmed and herded but did not yet make pottery. Radiocarbon dating places its foundation around 7000 BC. The settlement lasted for perhaps a thousand years before it was abandoned, and the hill was reoccupied, more modestly, by people who did make pottery in the fifth millennium BC. The site was discovered in 1934 by the Cypriot archaeologist Porphyrios Dikaios, who excavated it until 1946, and since 1976 it has been studied by a French mission from the CNRS, led for many years by Alain Le Brun. Only part of the village has been excavated, and UNESCO treats the rest as an archaeological reserve for the future.

How old is Khirokitia, and was it the first village on Cyprus?

Khirokitia was founded around 7000 BC, so it is roughly nine thousand years old, but it was not the first. For a long time it was thought to represent the earliest settlement of the island. Excavations since the 1990s at sites such as Shillourokambos, near Limassol, have shown that farmers from the mainland of the Near East had reached Cyprus by around the beginning of the ninth millennium BC, more than a thousand years earlier. Khirokitia is instead the best-preserved and best-known village of a later stage, when a distinctive island culture had developed. That culture is often named after it.

Round houses, pathways and built community

What makes Khirokitia remarkable is the state of its buildings. The houses are round, between about two and nine metres across, with lower walls of river and field stone and upper walls probably of mudbrick, set on floors of beaten earth that were renewed again and again. Inside, the excavators found hearths, basins, benches and platforms, low internal walls dividing the space, and stone piers that seem to have supported an upper floor or loft in some of the larger houses.

The houses did not stand alone. Several round buildings were grouped around a small open courtyard, where much of daily life, from grinding grain to preparing food, probably took place. Each group seems to have formed the home of a family, with different buildings used for sleeping, cooking and storage. Packed tightly together on the slope, these clusters made up the village, crossed by narrow paths.

Around the whole settlement ran a wall, rebuilt and extended several times as the village grew, in places about two and a half metres thick and preserved to three metres high. Access through it was carefully controlled, with an elaborate entrance of steps and passages found on the hilltop. Whether the wall was built for defence against other people, for protection from floods, or as a statement of the community’s identity, archaeologists cannot say for certain, but it shows a village that thought of itself as a bounded whole, and was able to organise the labour to build it.

Subsistence, burial and social interpretation

The people of Khirokitia grew wheat, barley, lentils and peas, gathered wild fruits such as figs, olives and pistachios, and kept sheep, goats and pigs. They also hunted deer, which had been brought to the island by the first settlers and became an important source of meat. Their tools were of flint and bone, and they carved fine bowls from the local stone, since they had no pottery. A small amount of obsidian, a volcanic glass not found on Cyprus, shows that some contact with the mainland continued.

The dead were buried in pits beneath the floors of the houses, usually in a crouched position, sometimes with offerings such as stone vessels. Burying the dead inside the home suggests a close bond between the living household and its ancestors, and some archaeologists have suggested a form of ancestor cult, though this is an interpretation rather than something the evidence can prove. Studies of the skeletons point to hard lives: average adult life expectancy seems to have been around thirty-five years, and infant mortality was very high. Small figurines, mostly of stone, hint at beliefs we can no longer recover.

What the evidence does not show is just as interesting. There is no sign of a palace, a temple or a house much grander than the others, and no clear evidence of rulers. Khirokitia looks like a community of households of broadly similar standing, organised enough to build and maintain a great wall, but without obvious marks of a ruling elite.

What experimental reconstruction can and cannot show

Beside the entrance to the site, five houses and a section of the wall have been reconstructed at full size, an initiative of the Cyprus Department of Antiquities with the scientific help of the French mission. They were built close to, but not on top of, the original remains, using stone, earth and timber, and they are furnished with replica hearths, platforms, grinding stones and household objects based on what was found in the excavation.

Stepping inside them is the best way to grasp the scale of Neolithic life: the size of the rooms, the dim light through small openings, the closeness of neighbours across the courtyard. Building them was also a kind of experiment, testing how much stone, mud and timber a house required and how it stood up to the weather.

But a reconstruction is an argument as well as a picture. The foundations survive; the roofs, the upper walls and much of the interior do not. Earlier interpretations imagined the houses as domed beehive huts, while evidence from a collapsed roof found during excavation suggests that at least some had flat roofs of timber, reeds and earth. Details such as the height of the walls, the placement of doors and windows and the use of each room are educated reconstructions. The houses show what is likely, not what is certain, and it is worth walking up to the original foundations afterwards to see the evidence they are based on.

How much walking does a visit to Khirokitia involve?

A moderate amount, mostly uphill. The reconstructed houses are near the entrance on fairly level ground, but the excavated village climbs a hillside, and the path up through it rises steadily on rough, stony ground and steps, with very little shade. You can see the reconstructions and the lower part of the site without making the full climb. A hat and water are essential in warm weather. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2, Moderate: three to five hours of activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground.

When is the best time of day and year to visit Khirokitia?

Morning, and ideally in spring or autumn. The hillside faces the sun and has almost no shade, so in summer the middle of the day is hot and glaring, while an early visit gives softer light for seeing the stonework and the view down the valley. In spring the scrub around the site is green and flowering, and the surrounding hills are at their best. Winter visits are perfectly possible and often clear and cool, though the paths can be slippery after rain. Whatever the season, allow time to look at the reconstructions first, then climb, so that the foundations on the hill make sense when you reach them.

Why Khirokitia is central to a deep-time reading of Cyprus

Khirokitia comes on the last full day of the tour, and it gives the whole journey its deepest perspective. By this point we have seen the Roman mosaics of Nea Paphos and the royal tombs and Roman city of Salamis. Khirokitia was already older to the builders of Salamis than Salamis is to us. It shows Cyprus before metal, before writing and before pottery, when the island’s first farming villages were taking shape.

The same day continues with the lace makers of Lefkara, the Larnaca Salt Lake and the Hala Sultan Tekke, and the ancient city of Kition with the church of Saint Lazarus in Larnaca. For a broader introduction to the region, see our overview of the Greek islands and Cyprus and our articles on Cyprus, and for how the whole journey from Athens fits together, our Eastern Mediterranean islands itinerary.

Few places let you stand so close to the beginnings of settled life. To walk up through Khirokitia with a guide, in a small group of 6 to 14 travellers, explore the Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus small group tour.