Cyprus Museum

Step in from the Nicosia heat and the air changes. The light softens. Your footsteps sound sharper on the stone floor, and the noise of traffic on Museum Avenue fades behind you. Around you stand glass cases, quiet and orderly. Inside them are objects that spent thousands of years underground. Some are no bigger than your thumb. Some are taller than you. This is the Cyprus Museum, the oldest and largest archaeological museum on the island.

The story of this place begins with a problem. In the late nineteenth century, Cyprus was being dug up at speed. Foreign collectors and adventurers shipped crates of ancient pottery and statues abroad. Much of the island's past ended up in museums far from home. In 1882, under British administration, a museum was founded to keep finds on Cypriot soil. It began modestly, in borrowed rooms, before moving into the building around you in the early twentieth century.

Take a moment to notice the building itself. It is a neoclassical design, built of pale, honey-coloured stone. The rooms are arranged in a loop, so you move through the island's history roughly in order, from the oldest objects to the latest. It feels more like a sequence of chapters than a single grand hall. The scale is human. You can see almost everything in one visit, which is rare for a collection this important.

The first chapters belong to the Neolithic, the late Stone Age, when the first farming villages appeared on Cyprus. Look for finds connected to Choirokoitia, a settlement in the south of the island with round stone houses. The tools here are simple — stone bowls, blades, grinding stones. But they belong to people who crossed the sea to reach this island. Every object in these early cases arrived by boat, or was made by people who did.

Next comes the Chalcolithic, or Copper Stone Age, when people began to work copper for the first time. This is where many visitors slow down. Look for small figures carved from picrolite, a soft blue-green stone found in Cypriot rivers. Many have arms stretched out to the sides, so the body forms a cross. Nobody knows exactly what they meant. Some scholars link them to fertility or childbirth. Others see them as amulets. They are quiet, strange and very modern-looking.

Here is the first surprise. That cross-shaped figure may look familiar, even if you have never been here before. A version of it appears on Cypriot euro coins. So the oldest art in this room still travels in people's pockets every day, across the island and beyond. Cyprus chose a figure around five thousand years old to represent itself in the modern currency.

Now the Bronze Age. Cyprus became rich because of copper — the metal may even share its name with the island. The pottery changes too. Look for red polished ware, shiny reddish pots with incised patterns and sometimes playful shapes. One famous piece is a clay model from Vounous, on the north coast. It shows a circular enclosure with tiny figures inside, apparently taking part in a ritual. It is like a snapshot of a ceremony, made in clay thousands of years ago.

As the Bronze Age goes on, Cyprus connects with Egypt, the Aegean and the Near East. Trade fills the cases with new styles. From Enkomi, an ancient city near the eastern coast, came two bronze figures that many visitors seek out. One is the Horned God, a young man in a horned helmet. The other stands on a base shaped like a copper ingot, the flat slab in which metal was traded. A god standing on money... the message about this island's wealth is very clear.

One room usually stops people in their tracks. It holds a crowd of terracotta figures from a sanctuary at Ayia Irini, in the northwest. A Swedish archaeological expedition found around two thousand of them in the late 1920s. They had been placed around an altar over many generations. The museum displays many of them together, standing in rows, as if they are still gathered for worship. Small warriors, chariots, figures of every size — they all face the same direction.

Another group of objects comes from the royal tombs at Salamis, an important ancient city on the east coast. These burials were rich. Look for furniture decorated with carved ivory, and large bronze cauldrons with the heads of griffins, mythical creatures with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. Archaeologists also found the remains of horses that had been buried with their chariots. These tombs show a world of kings, ceremony and display.

The later rooms move into the Classical, Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Marble becomes more common, and the faces become more lifelike. One of the best-known works is a marble statue of Aphrodite found at Soloi. According to Greek myth, the goddess of love was born from the sea off the coast of Cyprus. So here she is, at home. Nearby, look for a larger-than-life bronze statue of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus. Large ancient bronzes rarely survive. Most were melted down for their metal.

The second surprise is about absence. This collection is large, but it is not complete. Many Cypriot antiquities left the island in the nineteenth century and remain in museums abroad. Others were damaged, lost or scattered during periods of conflict. So as you walk, you are looking at what stayed. Each object here survived not only time, but also the long story of the island's politics. That gives the museum a quiet, protective feeling.

Before you leave, stand still in one of the rooms for a moment. Listen to the soft echo of other visitors and the hum of the air conditioning. Look at the scratches on a clay pot, the worn edge of a stone tool, the fingerprints of an ancient potter. When you step back out onto Museum Avenue, the city will be loud again. But the island beneath it is the same island these objects came from.