The Mesaoria combines every extreme of beauty and ugliness; barren, sand-bedevilled, empty, and under moon-light a haunted waste; then in spring bursting with the shallow splendours of anemone and poppy, and cross-hatched with silk-soft vegetation. Only here you realize that things pushed to extremes become their opposites; the ugly barren Mesaoria and the verdant one are so extreme that one wonders whether the beauty or ugliness has not the greater power.
Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons
When I first visited Agios Sozomenos in February, I was astonished: the land was lush, with tall green stalks of barley waving in the breeze. Just two months later, in mid-April, all the green had dried to the dirty-gold I associate with Mesaoria, the semi-arid plains of Cyprus. This variability was central to the life of everyone who lived in Agios Sozomenos and nearby areas, from the Bronze Age to today.
Agios Sozomenos is built in Mesaoria, near the confluence of the Alikos with the Yialias. This eastern part of the plains was originally a shallow bay that silted up over the past two million years (see Andrea Rowe, The Ayios Sozomenos Region: A Bronze Age Landscape in Cyprus (PhD thesis: University of Sydney, 1995)). Over that time, the rivers have delivered fertile sediments to replenish the soils of the alluvial plains, moving nutrients from the mineral-rich Troodos Mountains into the lowlands. These river valley floors are topped by kafkallia, a type of hard limestone that is resistant to weathering and thus lends itself to a topography of mesas, buttes, and plateaus overlooking the rivers. The Yialias may have been more powerful in the past, but in the past 6000 years the river has not incised itself more than 6 metres (Frank L. Koucky and Reuben G. Bullard, “The Geology of Idalion,” in American Expedition to Idalion, Cyprus: First Preliminary Report: Seasons of 1971 and 1972 (Cambridge, MA: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1974), p. 17). Yet even when the rivers don’t flow, there is underground water easily available by digging shallow wells.
The Alikos river winds through the village under the cliffs before it joins the Yialias. Most of the time, the Alikos is completely dry. The nearby Yialias has more water, but still rarely fills its wide riverbed. That’s why it was shocking to me to see this drone footage from January 2020:
The roads leading to and from Agios Sozomenos are impassable, at least without a high vehicle. This was a serious issue before the modern bridges were built. One old Turkish-Cypriot resident of the village tells how Greek-Cypriot children would occasionally join their Turkish co-villagers in their school in Agios Sozomenos, instead of going to nearby Potamia, when the Alikos was running.
Of course, this same water is vital to crops. Control of irrigation and the landscape is essential to understanding the area’s development from antiquity to today. Sturt Manning writes of three options available for farmers in the area in the Bronze Age: community storage; pastoralism, which can more easily exploit marginal land; and the concentration of land by wealthy owners who can
absorb some of the risk of crop failure in order to recoup a profit during wet years. This risk is unacceptable to subsistence farmers in a traditional economy who must minimize risk by guaranteeing a certain minimal yield each year.
Manning 2019: 112, quoting Wilkinson 2004: 41.
For many scholars of Bronze Age Cyprus (e.g. Bernard Knapp), this concentration of land forced by environmental circumstances is a central driver of the transition between the agrarian villages of the Early and Middle Bronze Age (2400–1750 BCE) and the sociopolitical complexity of the Late Bronze Age (1450–1200 BCE). This is also the time when we see the construction of large fortresses, including those on the cliffs above Agios Sozomenos, which many scholars have read as signs of the rise of the state.
In their study of these fortresses in Agios Sozomenos (part of the larger project directed by Despina Pilides of the Department of Antiquities), Eilis Monahan and Matthew Spigelman push back against this search for the rise of the state, a “teleology without a god” (Monahan and Spigelman 2019: 133, quoting Yoffee 2005: 21). They write:
That the fortifications served to “make places” and control people’s movement is certain; that this was the motivation of elites who directed their construction, less so. On the contrary, place-making and the establishment of authority were more likely to have been the byproducts of the far more mundane concerns of daily life … From the fortified sites that initially served defensive or economic purposes, protecting and observing the movement and interaction of people and materials, would emerge capabilities for the production of knowledge and the use of force over those people, materials, and the landscape. … These very affordances allowed an elite group to develop who could manipulate them to produce the first political regime on Cyprus, even if the production of such a system was not the intent of the original construction.
Monahan and Spigelman 2019: 154.
There is a well-founded concern with agency in these discussions, which gestures towards larger debates in the environmental humanities between climatic determinism on the one hand (certain groups of people behave in the ways they do because of their environment, against which they can exercise no control) and “flat ontology” on the other (both the environment and the people are inter- or intra-acting, affecting one another without either one determining the course of development). It is this latter approach that Monahan and Spigelman explicitly adopt, with prolific citations of Latour, Harman, DeLanda, and other “new materialists.” In the same volume, Catherine Kearns also elaborates on how
Cypriot landscapes were (and are) constantly in flux, forming and re-forming the island in concert with developing human activity.
Kearns 2019: 268.
Kearns explicitly argues against the creation of
a moral economy of environmental conditions, marked by value-laden terms such as prosperous, destructive, or favorable. These terms do little to explain how climates stimulate development or inequalities or how communities or social groups imagined, experienced, or conceived of shifting ecologies.
Kearns 2019: 271. See also Kearns 2013.
She concludes by writing that
An integrated methodology offers a counternarrative to the hypothesized centripetal power projected from the would-be city-kingdoms over dependent hinterlands and instead underscores the heterogeneity and accumulation of local practices in relation to preceding landscape modifications or to novel attempts at place-making. I would suggest that an approach that privileges neither environmental nor archaeological data and avoids reductive causal and temporal relationships by taking seriously the social lives of environments offers a more nuanced and robust examination of historical change and landscapes in the making.
Kearns 2019: 287.
I recognize that the literature on the political geography of Bronze Age Cyprus is quite large and I have made no attempts at comprehensiveness. That being said, another intriguing contribution is made by Michael Brown in 2013, where he argues that the Gialias river was used as an inland waterway to transport goods from settlements around Agios Sozomenos to the coastal port of Enkomi. Brown asserts that “while the Gialias and its tributary the Alykos are now reduced to ephemeral streams, largely due to modern upstream damming, in the second millenium BC these rivers would have constituted a substantial inland waterway outside of the dry summer months.” To anyone used to the mostly-dry riverbeds of Cyprus, especially in the arid Mesaoria region, this argument seems far-fetched to say the least. Brown cites the geomorphological work of Benoît Devillers to support his archaeological argument. Devillers himself provides detailed, valuable information on the Gialias river and watershed that includes a variety of field methods; however, Brown’s use of his work seems to reach too far (as was confirmed to me by a number of other experts in the field).
These concerns with the environment are not exclusive to prehistory. After all, it is the same river and the same fields that have continued to attract people to Agios Sozomenos. I will conclude this post by looking at the Byzantine and Ottoman land-use history of the site.