In January 2012, my family and I made a four-day stop on Cyprus to visit old friends. We were en route to Jerusalem, where a fellowship at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research was to help us complete a book about Kinyras, the legendary king of Cyprus and priest of Aphrodite (Kinyras: The Divine Lyre, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2016).Kinyras being a figure of considerable cultural and historical interest for Cyprus, Ruth Keshishian, longtime owner of Nicosia’s best academic bookstore (Moufflon Books), was able to raise a small flurry of media interest—a spot on national radio, a front-page newspaper story, and a lecture at the Pharos Arts Foundation. As Kinyras is practically unknown outside the island, this was a most welcome reception!

The advance publicity attracted the notice of Stavros Papageorghiou, a prominent Cypriot film-maker whose thirty-year career has included writing, directing, and/or producing a string of documentaries—supported by the Cyprus Cinema Advisory Committee (Ministry of Education and Culture) and the Media Development Programme of the European Union—on such topics of Cypriot cultural interest as Cyprus on the Silk Routes (1998), Telemachos Kanthos (1998), Sketches of Cypriot Literary Figures (2000), Nicos Nicolaides: The Colour of the Soul (2003), The Limassol Carnival (2006), Murid (2010), and Entelechy (2011). Papageorghiou, who was then developing the film under review here, contacted me and arranged a meeting in old Nicosia where, over a pleasant meal and drinks, he and Stalo Hadjipieri (right-hand associate producer and script-developer) quizzed me about my views on Kinyras. The next day I went out to Papageorghiou’s production studio for a formal video interview. (Ultimately the scope and focus of the film permitted only a passing mention of Kinyras; but some material will appear later this year in a follow-up called The Legacy of the Goddess that explores related traditions and legends—Kinyras, Adonis, Pygmalion, etc.). The following May, when we returned to Cyprus for a CAORC fellowship at the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, we travelled down to Palaipaphos and up the west coast to the Akamas peninsula, twice crossing paths with Papageorghiou and Hadjipieri, who were following and documenting a group of Dutch women, led by Dr. Stella Lubsen-Admiraal, on an Aphrodite-pilgrimage involving dances, frame-drumming, songs and prayers with ancient texts, and (bloodless) sacrifices. These performances were earnest and soul-searching, yet equally playful. Such an emotional attunement is well suited to the laughter-loving Aphrodite, and pervades The Great Goddess itself.

The film opens dramatically with dancing light and rippling waves at the spectacular Petra tou Romiou, popularly regarded as Aphrodite’s foamy landing-place since the late nineteenth century, when the British coast-road exposed the spot’s beauty. We then trace the Cypriot goddess from her earliest possible beginnings to the end of antiquity and beyond (the name ‘Aphrodite’ only came into common Cypriot use in the fifth or fourth century BCE). The narrative is appropriately built upon, and derives its coherence from, a diachronic survey of the island’s rich and fascinating archaeological material. This includes both iconography—with much lavish close-up museum photography, beginning from the famous female figurines of the Chalcolithic period from the southwestern corner of the island—and site-visits to Palaipaphos and Lempa, Amathous, and Pyrgos in the Limassol district (Palaipaphos and Amathous preceded by fantastic aerial views—awelcome indulgence for those who have tramped the sites). The archaeological story is consistently clarified by animated timelines and well-conceived maps showing object-distribution and demographic trends, and is further enlivened and dramatized by ajudicious selection of ancient textual sources (Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, Euripides, et al.) that are more freely incorporated in evocative entr’actes.

At every juncture the story is illuminated by learned commentary from leading scholars. There is a starring role for the wonderful Dr. Jacqueline Karageorghis, whose long devotion to understanding the Cypriot Goddess began before the 1965 excavation of Palaipaphos by a Swiss-German expedition, reached a first plateau in a doctoral dissertation (published in 1977 as La grande déesse de Chypre et son culte à travers l’iconographie de l’époque néolithique au VIème s.a.C., Lyon/Paris), and culminated inthe authoritative Kypris: The Aphrodite of Cyprus (

 

Her footsteps often bring her to this location which seems to be destined for the emergence of beauty. At this primitive landscape she listens to the echoes of the past. 

 

Karageorghis’ search for Kypris and the goddess’s own diachronic development is punctuated at regular intervals by other scholars’ observations and opinions. Yiannis Violaris (Department of Antiquities, Cyprus) speaks about Chalcolithic arts, birthing scenes, and the early cultural importance of female fertility. Images of the remarkable “Lady of Lemba”—a figurine of a pregnant woman with phallus-shaped neck—leads toProf. Edgar Peltenburg (University of Edinburgh, Director of the Lemba ResearchCenter) and his experimental reconstruction of a clay house- or sanctuary-model from Kissonerg; these are tentatively interpreted via Mesopotamian parallels for “birthing houses under the supervision of midwives or priestesses”; but Peltenberg equally warns against over-reading early female figurines as religious evidence. Dr. Maria Rosaria Belgiorno (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy) discusses her excavations of Pyrgos and what she would see as a triangular sanctuary (ca. 1800 BCE) to a goddess, coupled with workshops for metallurgy, perfumed oil, and textiles. There follows an exposition on the Late Bronze Age and the island’s centrality to the copper-trade(including one of the relevant diplomatic letters, preserved in the fourteenth-century Amarna archives of Egypt, from the from the king of Alashiya—a Great Kingdom widely accepted as comprising much if not all of Cyprus at that time); relations with the Mycenaean Aegean; the famous Ingot God of Enkomi and ‘sacred metallurgy’ at Kition. An account of the twelfth-eleventh century Aegean immigrations that followed the ‘Great Collapse’ (see recently E. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Princeton, 2014) leads Dr. Thomas Kiely (British Museum, Cyprus Collection) to discuss the so-called Goddess with Upraised Arms (a type showing Aegean influence that endured from the eleventh–sixth century) in terms of female social status and cultic roles. Here Dr. Stephanie Lynn Budin (University of Oregon) continues the crusade against what is conventionally known as Sacred Prostitution—in her view an historiographical myth that originated with Herodotos (the film’s own narrative seems more inclined to accept some underlying cultural reality in discussing the “woman at the window” motif). The tour proceeds through the famous eighth-century Hubbard Vase (the seated figure is interpreted as a priestess); androgynous and bearded forms of ‘Aphrodite’, connected with Ishtar; the Cypro-Archaic period and the renewed presence of Astarte during the Phoenician colonial movement of the ninth and eighth centuries); birthing and midwife figurines from fifth-century Lapethos; and the goddess’s exposure to Hathor via Byblos.Prof. Antoine Hermary (Aix-Marseille University) of the French Archaeological mission at Amathous appears among the excavations to discuss the first attestation of the name ‘Aphrodite’ in a fourth-century royal inscription. This is connected with a broader Hellenizing trend in the Cypro-Classical period, also reflected in statuary and the career of Euagoras I of Salamis. We then smoke a cigarette in the office of Dr. Angelos Delivorias (Director Emeritus of the Benaki museum), while he discusses the spread of the goddess’s cult beyond Cyprus, with an important stage at Kythera (where Herodotos tells us there was a Phoenician temple to Ourania); Delivorias concludes, with a rhapsodic flourish, that “the whole world of the eastern Mediterranean basin is interconnected, with the worship of this Goddess serving as the connecting thread”. Dr. Tuomo Lankila (University of Jyväskylä) addresses the philosophical elaboration of Aphrodite’s several aspects within the Platonic tradition. Returning to Cyprus, Dr. Anja Ulbrich (Leventis Curator, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), connects the iconography of the kalathos with ‘Aphrodite’ as “as a goddess of vegetation . . . of the abundance of the earth”. The motif is also found, of course, on fourth-century Cypriot coins that portray the goddess as city-protectress (discussed here by Dr. Andrew Burnett, former Deputy Director of the British Museum). The Hellenistic period is represented by the advent of Isis, notably at Amathous (discussed by Hermary); Ptolemaic influence is further seen in the identification of Arsinoe I with the Cypriot goddess. Highlights of the Roman periodinclude the special protection of Paphos under the Julio-Claudians as being the home of the dynasty’s ancestral goddess; the conical cult-stone of Paphos described by Tacitus and shown on coins of the period; and the spread of Venus/Aphrodite throughout the Empire, with Paphos however remaining the cult’s epicenter (rivaling Delphi as “the Navel of the Earth”, according to a remarkable entry in Hesykhios).

An ominous thunder-clap suggests Papageorghiou’s own feelings about the impact of Christianity and the gradual unthroning of Aphrodite, for whom Theodosius in the late fourth century finally denied any hymn, sacrifice, or pilgrimage. That elements of her character and worship were subsumed by the Medieval island’s ‘Righena’ and Panayia could be only briefly mentioned given time-constraints (see further J. Karageorghis, Kypris, p228–9, and, one hopes, Papageorghiou’s sequel mentioned above). Nevertheless the goddess’s survival—and revival—is quietly implied throughout the film by periodic appeals to folklore and scenes of neo-pagan re-enactors and pilgrims. AndreasCharalambides, a Paphian artist who has produced a series on the Kinyras cycle, freely retells several myths about his region’s culture-hero, whom he seems to regard as an historical figure. Several performances of women dancing with frame-drums at Paphos and elsewhere—familiar from countless Cypriot terracotta-votives going back to the Late Bronze Age, and the Cypro-Phoenician symposium bowls of the ninth-sixth centuries—represent an active movement on the island, the self-perception of which is voiced by Ianthi Sparsis (Ma Gaia Drummers): “Τhe frame-drum held in the hands οf the Goddesses or the priestesses represented her power to create the universe with one stroke on her drum. With one beat of her primordial heart, everything vibrated into existence.”We see further female re-enactors in a nocturnal procession. The elderly wife of the priest of Kouklia prays and makes a smoke-offering to the Panayia at a niche in an ancient column; her neighbor, while breast-feeding, did this ritual in the 1950s (so Papageorghiou informs me). Kyriakos Kallis, a Cypriot sculptor from Idalion, dons a bull-head mask as the narrator discusses metallurgical rites and “settlers from the east”. Papageorghiou himself appears in a kind of self-portrait to contemplate the sea from a windswept cliff. The importance of this Leitmotif—the living re-imagination of the Cypriot past—climaxes in the film’s closing imagery when the final scene with Karageorghis fades to the dancing light and rippling waves of Petra tou Rhomiou, and a recitation of “La mer de Kypris” from the Cypriot idyll of Louÿs’ Les chansons de Bilitis:

 

These were the same waves and these were the self-same shores that saw one day the white body of Aphrodite rising. . . I suddenly hid my eyes in my hands.

 

For I had seen the water trembling with a thousand little lips of light: the pure sex, or it may have been the smile of Kypris Philommeïdes.

 

The message of continuity is cemented by the final dedication “to all women everywhere, who from generation to generation hand down the archetype of femininity as ordained by the Great Goddess of Cyprus”.

Notwithstanding the film’s very professional production—including an outstanding score by Gavriel Karapatakis, first-rate cinematography by Nikos Avraamides, Ektor Papageorgiou,   Christos Koykkoufkiaos, and Papageorghiou himself, and attractive narration by Michele Howard and Alexander McCowan (Thea Christodoulidou  and  Photis Apostolides in the Greek version)—The Great Goddess was clearly a labor of love. The spiritual and artistic devotion of Papageorghiou and Hadjipieri is obviousthroughout. The collective knowledge on which the film rests derives of course from the selfless dedication of the scholars interviewed here who—along with very many more—have dedicated their lives to Cypriot studies and related matters. The public enthusiasm raised by the project can be seen in the substantial crowd-funding through Indigogo that bolstered Papageorghiou’s and Hadjipieri’s own pocketbooks. Besides a major donation by Cintra Reeve, there were institutional contributions by The Ministry of Education and Culture of Cyprus (the Minister, Dr. Costas Kadis, has distributed 400 DVDs to Cypriot public schools), the Cyprus Tourism Organization, the Electricity Authority of Cyprus, the island’s Press and Information Office, the Cyprus Telecommunication Authority, and Medochemie Industries. It is clear, as Papageorghiou has stated, that “my compatriots still love their ancient Goddess”. 

The film’s premiere at the Philoxenia Conference Centre in Nicosia on 24 November 2014, organized in collaboration with Dr. Marina Solomidou-Ieronimidou (Director of the Department of Antiquities) drew an audience of 500—nearly twice what had been predicted. Further screenings have included the Rassegna Internazionale del Cinema Archeologico (Roverto, October 7, 2015), soon followed by the British Museum (October16), and the goddess’s own sanctuary at Palaipaphos, where the village authorities also honored Dr. Karageorghis for her life’s research (October 27). Those who missed these events can see the film in Athens on March 8th, 2016 at the Spiti tis Kyprou (under the auspices of the Cypriot Embassy); in Belgrade next April in the 17th Archaeology Film Festival at the National Museum; and again in Nicosia in July at the First Archaeological Film Festival of Cyprus (organized by Tetraktys Films Ltd.).

Notwithstanding my own (fairly tangential) connection with the film, I would enthusiastically recommend The Great Goddess of Cyprus for both general audiences and academic use. University collections would gain a vivid and effective resource for classes in Mythology, Religion, and Anthropology, and the film can equally serve as an introductory survey of the complex political, cultural, and artistic history of “the sweet land of Cyprus”.