The Ledra research project is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary investigation of ceramic assemblages from the wider Nicosia region, dating to the Iron Age and the Hellenistic period. The study focuses on the extensive settlement site of the Hill of Agios Georgios, located in the heart of Nicosia and excavated by the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus. During the Iron Age, this site has been associated with the elusive city-kingdom of Ledroi, and with a thriving city during the Hellenistic period. By applying a macro-historic and regionally-oriented interdisciplinary approach to the pottery production of Ledroi, the project aims to explore the site’s cultural identity, socio-economic organisation, and possible territorial extent.
The significance of this project lies in its comparative analysis of a large pottery corpus deriving not only from the main settlement of Ledroi, but also from various contexts unearthed during earlier excavations across the wider Nicosia region, many of which remain largely unknown to scholarship. These contexts include, on the one hand, cemetery-sites contemporaneous with the settlement, which are located within the modern suburbs of Nicosia (Ayii Omologites and Acropolis). Although these sites have not been preserved due to urban development, their material assemblages, primarily pottery, are housed in the Cyprus Museum, Nicosia. On the other hand, the study also incorporates a cult-site, the Nymphaeum of Kafizin, currently inaccessible as it lies within the UN-controlled buffer zone, near the modern suburb of Aglantzia. Dating to the Hellenistic period, this Nymphaeum has yielded a remarkable assemblage of vessels, many bearing inscriptions in Cypro-Syllabic and alphabetic Greek. These artefacts are currently stored in the Cyprus Museum, and remain unpublished in their entirety.
A rigorous ceramological study (including macroscopic fabric descriptions, morphological and decorative attributes, chrono-typological sequences) will be integrated with targeted petrographic and chemical analyses (using wavelength-dispersive X-ray fluorescence, WD-XRF). These latter analyses will be conducted at the Fitch Laboratory of the British School at Athens. Through the technological and compositional characterisation of regional pottery production in Ledroi and the broader Nicosia region, the Ledra project seeks to enhance our understanding of the socio-cultural setting and politico-economic organisation of Ledroi during the 1st millennium BC.
Furthermore, GIS mapping will be employed to illustrate the evolution of the settlement patterns in the region and the spatial distribution of Ledroi pottery production during the Iron Age and the Hellenistic periods. In addition, 3D-models of vessels, produced via photogrammetry at the laboratories of the Archaeological Research Unit, will support the visualisation and analysis of material culture deriving from jeopardized sites, such as the case of Kafizin and the tombs found beneath the built modern city. Alongside the digitisation of the assemblages, this innovative interdisciplinary study will revitalise and valorise long-neglected legacy data by recontextualising it with newly excavated material from Ledroi, ultimately generating a coherent narrative on the historicity of Nicosia.
Last Updated on July 29, 2025