Khirokitia

Listen first. A dry wind moves through the wild olive and the thyme on this hillside. Somewhere below, a car hums along the motorway, and then it is gone. The path under your feet is pale and stony, and the stones around you are arranged in circles. They are low, round walls, one after another, climbing the slope. These are the remains of homes. People lived in them about 9,000 years ago.

You are standing in Khirokitia, one of the best-preserved Neolithic villages in the eastern Mediterranean. Neolithic means the New Stone Age. It is the period when people began to farm, keep animals, and settle in one place instead of following the herds. In 1998, UNESCO added this hillside to its World Heritage List. The settlement sits in the valley of the Maroni River, a few kilometres inland from the south coast of Cyprus.

Here is the first surprise. The people who built this village did not make pottery. Archaeologists call this phase the Aceramic Neolithic, which simply means the Neolithic without ceramics. Instead of clay pots, these villagers carved bowls and basins out of stone. Many were cut from a hard, grey-green volcanic rock called andesite. Shaping one of those bowls with stone tools took patience and real skill.

Now look at the shape of the buildings. Every house here is round. The walls stood on stone foundations, and the upper parts were often built of mud brick and packed earth. Many experts believe the roofs were flat, made from timber, reeds, and clay. A family home was usually not one building, but a small cluster of round rooms around a shared yard. One room was for sleeping, another for grinding grain, another perhaps for storage.

Walk a little further up the slope and you will see a long, thick wall. For years, the first excavators thought it was a main street running through the village. Later research gave a different answer. The wall marked the edge of the settlement, and it may have protected it. As the village grew, the people built beyond it and added a new wall. Access was through a carefully built entrance with steps, which suggests that people controlled who came in.

The first serious excavations here were led by the Cypriot archaeologist Porphyrios Dikaios, in the years around the Second World War. Decades later, a French mission returned and continued the work with modern methods. Thanks to both teams, we know a great deal about daily life on this hill. We know what the people ate, how they worked, and, quite intimately, how they treated their dead.

And here is the second surprise. The villagers buried their dead inside their homes. Graves were dug into the floors of the round houses, and the bodies were laid in a curled, sleeping position. Life simply went on above them. Families cooked, talked, and slept over the remains of their grandparents. To us it may feel strange. To them, it seems the dead remained part of the household.

The skeletons also tell us about the bodies of these people. Life was short by modern standards. Many people died young, and the work of farming and grinding grain left marks on their bones. Some skulls show a deliberate change of shape, probably made by binding the head in infancy. We do not know exactly why. It may have been a sign of belonging, or simply an idea of beauty.

Think, too, about how these people reached Cyprus at all. The island is surrounded by sea. Every sheep, goat, and pig here came over by boat from the mainland, together with seeds for wheat and barley. The villagers also hunted deer in the surrounding hills. So this quiet hillside is also evidence of early sea crossings. Small boats carried animals, families, and an entire way of life across open water.

Near the entrance, you can see something that brings the ruins to life. A group of reconstructed round houses stands there, built with the same kinds of materials the original villagers used. Step inside one. Notice how cool it feels after the sun, and how the low doorway makes you bend. The thick walls keep out heat, and the small space feels close and sheltered. It gives a real sense of how these families lived.

The name of this place belongs to the modern village of Choirokoitia, just nearby. That village has its own, much later, history. In the fifteenth century, a battle took place in this area between the army of the Lusignan kingdom of Cyprus and a Mamluk force from Egypt. The Cypriot king was defeated and captured. So this one valley holds two very different stories, separated by many thousands of years.

As you climb, the view opens up. You can see the valley, the folded hills, and the low scrub that covers them. Small lizards rush across warm stones. In spring, the slopes turn green and fill with wildflowers. In summer, the ground turns gold and the air smells of dust and wild herbs. The people who lived here saw the same hills, the same light, and probably felt the same wind.

Before you leave, stop for a moment at one of the round foundations. Look at the stones fitted together by hands that never knew metal, writing, or the wheel. Someone chose each stone, carried it up this slope, and set it in place. Then someone else lived here, raised children here, and was buried under this floor. As you walk back down toward the entrance, listen again to the wind in the olive trees. It is the oldest sound on this hill.