Salamis, Cyprus: Harbour City, Antiquity and the Famagusta Coast

Salamis, on the east coast of Cyprus a few kilometres north of Famagusta, was for well over a thousand years one of the great cities of the island: a harbour city-kingdom in the Iron Age and Classical period, a wealthy Roman town, and in late antiquity, under the name Constantia, the capital of Cyprus once more. Its ruins stretch along the shore among dunes and pine and mimosa, with a restored Roman gymnasium, baths, a theatre and the remains of great Christian basilicas, while inland lie the royal tombs of its early kings. On Day 19 of our Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus tour we spend a day at Salamis, its royal tombs and the walled city of Famagusta.

Salamis as a harbour city on the Famagusta coast

Salamis grew up beside the sea for a reason. The east coast of Cyprus faces the Levant, and the bay where the city stood gave it a natural harbour on the routes between the Aegean, the Syrian and Phoenician coast, and Egypt. The city’s earliest remains date to the eleventh century BC, at the end of the Late Bronze Age, when it seems to have taken over from Enkomi, an older town a short distance inland whose access to the sea had been cut off as the coastline silted up.

Ancient tradition gave Salamis a more heroic beginning. According to the legend, it was founded by Teucer, son of Telamon, king of the island of Salamis near Athens. Returning from the Trojan War, Teucer was banished by his father for failing to avenge his brother Ajax, sailed east and founded a new Salamis in Cyprus, naming it after his home. The legend is a story the city told about itself, a claim to Greek and Homeric ancestry, rather than history, but the city’s people held to it, and the cult of Zeus Salaminios, which tradition said Teucer had established, remained important into Roman times.

Is Salamis in Cyprus connected to the Battle of Salamis?

No. The famous naval battle of 480 BC, in which the Greeks defeated the Persian fleet, was fought off the island of Salamis near Athens. The two places share a name because of the Teucer legend. Salamis in Cyprus had its own battles, though: in 306 BC Demetrius Poliorcetes, one of the generals fighting over Alexander the Great’s empire, defeated Ptolemy I in a great sea battle off the city and took Cyprus for a time.

Who was buried in the royal tombs of Salamis?

The most important people of the early city, probably its kings and leading families. A short distance inland from the ruins lies a cemetery of large built tombs, most dating to the eighth and seventh centuries BC. They are called royal because of their size and the richness of what was found in them, though no inscription names the people buried there.

Their burial rites were remarkable. The dead were brought to the tomb along a long, sloping ramp, the dromos, on a chariot or hearse, and the horses that drew it were sacrificed and buried in the ramp, sometimes still in harness with the vehicle. Grave goods included bronze cauldrons, ivory-decorated furniture and jars of oil. These rites closely resemble the funeral of Patroclus described in Homer’s Iliad, a parallel that excited the archaeologists who excavated the tombs in the 1960s. Tomb 47, the largest, held the skeletons of six horses, and Tomb 79 produced the richest finds, including an ivory-decorated throne and bed and a great bronze cauldron decorated with griffins and sphinxes. The original finds from the 1960s excavations were taken to the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia, which the tour visits on Day 18; a small museum beside the tombs explains the site.

Classical, Hellenistic and Roman continuities

By the Classical period Salamis was the leading city-kingdom of Cyprus, ruled by its own kings under Persian overlordship. Its most famous king, Evagoras I, who reigned from around 411 to 374 BC, championed Greek culture, drew Athenian allies to his court and for a time fought Persia for control of the island. The line of kings ended in 311 BC, when Nikokreon, the last of them, was forced to take his own life during the wars between Alexander’s successors; a large burial mound outside the city is associated with his memory.

Under the Ptolemies and then Rome, the capital of Cyprus moved west to Nea Paphos, described in our guide to Paphos Archaeological Park, but Salamis stayed rich. It remained the island’s great commercial city, and the emperors Trajan and Hadrian restored and rebuilt its public buildings after the city suffered in the Jewish revolt of AD 116 to 117. In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul and Barnabas land at Salamis at the start of their first missionary journey and preach in its synagogues, before crossing the island to Paphos; Barnabas, a native of Cyprus, is remembered in Christian tradition as the founder of the Cypriot church.

Urban archaeology, public buildings and maritime exchange

The most striking remains of Salamis belong to its Roman and late antique city. At the northern end of the site, the gymnasium is the centrepiece: a large courtyard, the palaestra, surrounded by colonnades whose marble columns have been set up again, with a swimming pool at either end and a bath complex beside it. Many of the statues found here had lost their heads, and it is often suggested, though it cannot be proved, that this was done by Christians in late antiquity. Nearby is the theatre, built in the time of Augustus, which could seat as many as 15,000 people and has been partly restored. Further south lay the agora, the market square, and the temple of Zeus Salaminios, whose sanctuary had the right to give asylum to those who fled there.

All of this rested on the sea. The harbour linked Salamis to the wider Mediterranean, carrying out the copper, timber, oil and wine of Cyprus and bringing in goods from the Aegean, Egypt and the Levant. The royal tombs already show it: much of the material buried in them came from Egypt and the Syrian coast. The harbour was the city’s life, and in the end its slow silting contributed to the city’s decline.

The day also includes the Shipwreck Museum, which displays the Kyrenia ship, one of the best-preserved merchant ships of the ancient Greek world. Found by a Cypriot diver in 1965 and raised in 1968 and 1969, the roughly fourteen-metre vessel sank around 300 BC carrying several hundred amphorae, most of them from Rhodes, together with millstones and thousands of almonds. It is a direct witness to the kind of coastal trade that made cities like Salamis rich.

From Salamis to Constantia and Famagusta

Early in the fourth century AD a series of earthquakes devastated Salamis. The emperor Constantius II rebuilt it as Constantia, and it became once again the capital of Cyprus and the seat of its archbishop. Its most famous bishop, Epiphanius, who died in 403, was buried in the great basilica built for him, whose foundations and columns still stand among the ruins; another large basilica, Kampanopetra, stood near the shore. But the harbour continued to silt up, and the Arab raids of the seventh century brought the city’s end. Its people moved to the nearby coastal town of Arsinoe, the place that would become Famagusta.

Famagusta took over Salamis’s role as the harbour of the east coast, and in the Middle Ages it became one of the richest ports in the Mediterranean, above all after the fall of the last crusader cities on the Syrian coast in 1291. Its cathedral of Saint Nicholas, built in the early fourteenth century in a Gothic style often compared to the cathedral of Reims, was where the Lusignan kings of Cyprus were crowned as kings of Jerusalem. The Venetians, who took over the island in 1489, surrounded the city with massive walls and bastions, which withstood a long Ottoman siege before Famagusta fell in 1571; the cathedral was then converted into a mosque, which it remains. The stones of Salamis are part of this story too, since much building material was carried from the ancient city to Famagusta.

How much walking does a visit to Salamis involve?

A good deal, on mostly flat ground. The ancient city is spread over a large area along the coast, and walking from the gymnasium and theatre to the basilicas covers some distance over uneven paths, ruined pavements and sand, with little shade outside the pine groves. The royal tombs are a short drive inland and involve walking down the tomb ramps. A hat, water and comfortable shoes are worth having. 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.

Salamis within the Cyprus journey

Salamis comes near the end of our week on Cyprus. Earlier, we see the Roman mosaics of Nea Paphos and the Byzantine frescoes of the Troodos painted churches. The next day we visit the far older settlement of Khirokitia, a Neolithic village that was already ancient when Salamis was founded. For a broader introduction to the island, see our articles on Cyprus, and for how the whole journey from Athens connects, our Eastern Mediterranean islands itinerary.

Salamis is a place where the long history of the Cypriot coast can be read in a single walk: Homeric burials, a Classical kingdom, a Roman city of baths and theatres, a Christian capital, and the harbour town that replaced it. To explore it with a guide, in a small group of 6 to 14 travellers, see the Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus small group tour.