| A few miles east of Girne in Northern 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 more than a thousand
years, and many of 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 very much.
You will see other villages in Cyprus where the people ate
mostly fish. But, 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 and ground it to flour between shaped stones. We grew
lentils for soups and grapes for wine. We could keep pet dogs
and cats, because we always had enough to eat.
"We used stone sickles and axes, knives and chisels.
We carved fishhooks and needles from bone. No one had discovered
the metal called copper or knew how to wrest it from its ores.
"But this village was part of one of the great revolutions
of humankind, for we were farmers and we made pots.
"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 the 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 here in North Cyprus. 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 Northern 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 lived in flimsy houses. 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.
"Did you see the spindle whorls in the museum? They
are stone disks with a hole in the center. We put a stick
through the hole so several inches were above the whorl and
an inch or two was below it and that was our spindle. We took
a piece of yarn and wrapped it around the stick at the top,
then over the whorl, around the stick down below, and back
up over the whorl. Then we fed the yarn through a notch near
the top of the stick. This yarn was now ready to act as the
leader for the yarn we were about to spin. We held the clean,
carded wool loosely in our left hand and kept the leader yarn
between the thumb and forefinger of our right hand.
"First we would twist the spindle, then pull some fibers
from our left hand and lay them next to the leader yarn. Then
we would let go and as the spindle unwound, the yarn was spun.
It looks easy, but it takes practice to make a smooth, even
thread.
"In the summers, this was mostly a place of women and
young children. The older boys would keep the flocks up on
the hillsides and sleep in tents. The men hunted or braved
the sea for fish or went trading. Here on the coast we were
sometimes visited by ships from home that brought obsidian
to trade, so our men could make tools that were highly prized
inland.
"Everyone helped with preparing the fields and sowing
the grains and lentils. And everyone helped with the harvest,
reaping and threshing. We, the women, cared for the wee ones
and made pots, but much of the day was given to grinding grain
and making cloth. A boring life, you say? Ah, but we did it
together. We would gather in a house or in a courtyard and
tell stories or sing or gossip as we worked. Sometimes the
young girls would complain that nothing changed. And it was
true, we were very slow to change. But then, when you have
much to do each day, isn't it easier to do things as
you always have? And why should we change? We had food and
shelter, many children lived to adulthood. What did we need
that we did not have?
"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."
Copyright 2006 SeaTerra
For a non copyrighted version of this article which can be
reprinted please go to Vrysi,
North Cyprus in History
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Vrysi - Neolithic History in North Cyprus
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