A few miles east of Girne in North Cyprus, on the seashore, lies the Neolithic site of Vrysi. Archaeologists have examined a small part of the site, and left some of the house walls exposed. The sea has undercut the promontory on which the village stood, and the whole area will fall into the sea before long. Visitors may look at the site and walk around its edges, but may not enter it, lest they disturb this fragile place. If you have seen the artifacts from the site at the museum in Girne Castle, you can imagine them in use, here where they were found. Your guide is a woman who lived here and raised her family some seven thousand years ago, when the village was already very old.
“Welcome to our village, strangers. Please look, but do not touch. My people have lived here for over a thousand years, and our honored dead are buried beneath these stones.
“Imagine this place ringing with the laughter of children, busy with the sounds we made grinding grain, flaking stone tools, chopping wood. We were a happy people, able to raise or find plenty of food, and able to store it against the dry years and the bad crops.
“Though we lived by the sea, we did not fish much. We had our goats and sheep and pigs, and the men hunted in the great forests. The trees provided us with carobs, figs, lemons, and olives. We raised wheat and barley, lentils, even grapes for wine. We could keep pet dogs and cats, because we always had enough to eat.
“We used stone sickles, axes, knives, spindle weights, and chisels. We carved fishhooks and needles from bone.
“You can see just six of our North Cyprus houses. We had about twenty houses in my day. They were grouped in clusters since several extended families lived in our village. We stayed here all year long, generation upon generation. Before our ancestors learned to farm, only small groups of people could stay together all year. In those olden days, the people would come together for festivals and to arrange marriages, then scatter to harvest whatever the wild world provided. Late winter and spring were always starving times, when grandparents died and too often the little children died as well.
“In those days before farming, it was difficult to preserve food for the winter. Our ancestors dug pits in the ground and lined them with hides, but mice and other vermin always found their way into the cache. Of course people have known that some kinds of mud harden in fire ever since the first child tried to bake a mud pie. Pottery was simply no use to our wandering ancestors—too heavy and too apt to break. But we farmed, we lived a settled life, and we made pots. We could store food safely. We had no starving time.
“We lived here by the sea, but the spring where we draw water is some ways away. Without pots, we would need to carry water little by little in skin bags. Have you ever tasted water from a skin bag after a day in the hot sun? Ah, then you can appreciate a pottery water jug.
“You can see how important pottery was to us by this fact: the archaeologists who excavated here found sixty-two thousand sherds of pottery and only one thousand other artifacts of all kinds.
“We made pottery ourselves, each family having its own designs. You can see the grace and boldness of those designs in the museum. Our pottery was white and we painted it in dark red or in brown. We had no pottery wheel, but shaped each piece by hand and fired it in small ovens.
“The designs on our pots came with our ancestors when they left Mersin in Turkey to make a brave voyage across the sea to North Cyprus. At first they were afraid, those pioneers. Their houses were half underground, and they built a ditch as a defense against attack on this precious property. But, little by little, we learned we had nothing to fear.
“Our ancestors here at Vrysi lived in flimsy houses when they first arrived. But ours, as you can see, were sturdily built. We had paved walkways between our homes so we did not have too much mud tracked in.
“We liked rectangular houses, but sometimes the lay of the land forced an irregular shape. We rounded the corners, so they were easy to keep clean, and we had lovely walls plastered with clay. We covered our floors with woven mats. Wooden pillars supported our high thatched roofs.
“We built stone benches along the walls of our houses and had storage bins made of stone slabs. A large hearth was the center of each house. At night, our one-room homes were cozy with the firelight and with the glow of oil burning in stone lamps. We made small stone figurines which were honored in our homes, but that is a religious matter, which we do not discuss with strangers.
“My people lived here for over a hundred generations, until an earthquake made the place unsafe and we moved away. For five thousand years since then, the sea has undercut our promontory. In the not-too-distant future, the sea will swallow the whole village. Then all that will remain to recall our lives will be the pottery sherds and bone needles and stone spindle whorls in the museum at Girne, North Cyprus.”
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Jessica I. Jones is a free lance writer working with Cyprus Seaterra. If you have any North Cyprus questions feel free to visit the site at www.cyprus-seaterra.com/
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