just more than two miles north of the old harbour, paphos you will find the tomb of the kings (tafon ton vasileon). the tombs are impressive enough to be worthy of kings. they are burial caves carved into the rock of a hill and decorated with doric colums and capitals. they date back from the fourth century b.c. visitors are free to explore the inner rooms of the tombs .tourists can visit between monday to friday 7:30am - 5pm and saturday and sunday between 9am - 5pm.
On UNESCO's World Heritage list, these tombs date back to 300BC when the Ancient Greeks ruled Cyprus with Paphos as their capital. The tombs are still on the outskirts of the town as they were nearly two and a half millenia ago but are now open to the curious tourist to poke about in. No bones, urns or other funerary deposits remain, long since looted by antique hunters.
The site is divided up into eight different tomb complexes, some of them just holes called loculi hacked out of the soft, sandstone strata; others are far more elaborate involving flights of steps down into the roomed tombs. Numbers three, four and eight are the most elaborate with Doric columns forming a peristyle around a central courtyard. Peeling off, like rooms in a house, are adult-sized and child-sized spaces. As they lived in life, so they lay in death.
As you walk around, keep an eye out for the Cypriot plantlife which blooms in winter and spring around the tombs. Unploughed, the ground harbours many flowers including cascades of cyclamen during January, February and March.
