By 
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, leaving some of the walls of the house exposed. The sea has undermined the promontory the village stood on, and the entire area will fall into the sea before long. Visitors can look at the site and walk around its edges, but they are not allowed inside, lest they disturb this fragile place. If you’ve seen the artifacts from the site in the museum at Girne Castle, you can imagine them in use, right here where they were found. Your guide is a woman who lived here and raised her family about seven thousand years ago, when the town was already very old.
“Welcome to our village, outsiders. Look, but do not touch. My people have lived here for over a thousand years, and our honored dead are buried under these stones.
“Imagine this place ringing with the laughter of children, occupied with the sounds we made grinding grain, shelling stone tools, chopping wood. We were a happy people, able to raise or find plenty of food, and able to store it against drought.” years and bad harvests.
“Although we lived by the sea, we did not fish much. We kept our goats, sheep and pigs, and the men hunted in the great forests. The trees gave us carob, figs, lemons and olives. We raised wheat and barley, lentils, even grapes for came… We could keep dogs and cats as pets, because we always had enough to eat.
“We used stone sickles, axes, knives, spindle weights, and chisels. We carved bone hooks and needles.
“You can see only six of our houses in Northern Cyprus. We had about twenty houses in my time. They were grouped together because several extended families lived in our village. We stayed here all year, generation after generation. Before our As ancestors learned to farm, only small groups of people could stay together year-round.In those ancient times, people would gather for festivals and arrange marriages, then disperse to harvest what the wild world provided.The End of Winter and spring was always a time of famine, when grandparents died and all too often small children died too.
“In those days before agriculture, it was difficult to preserve food for the winter. Our ancestors dug holes in the ground and covered them with fur, but mice and other vermin always found their way into the hiding place. Of course, the People knew that some types of clay harden in fire since the first child tried to bake a mud pie.Pottery simply wasn’t useful to our wandering ancestors: it was too heavy and too prone to breaking.But we farmed, we lived a sedentary life and made pots We could safely store food We didn’t have time to go hungry.
“We used to live here by the sea, but the spring where we get water is quite far away. Without pots, we would have to carry the water little by little in leather bags. Have you ever tasted water from a leather bag after a day? in the hot sun Ah, so you can appreciate a ceramic water jug.
“You can see how important pottery was to us by this fact: the archaeologists who excavated here found 62,000 pottery shards and only 1,000 other artifacts of all kinds.
“We made pottery ourselves, each family had their own designs. You can see the grace and boldness of those designs in the museum. Our pottery was white and we painted it dark red or brown. We didn’t have a potter’s wheel, but the shape each piece by hand and fired in small ovens.
“The designs for our vessels came with our ancestors when they set out from Mersin in Turkey to make a brave journey across the sea to Northern Cyprus. They were afraid at first, those pioneers. Their houses were half underground, and they built a ditch as a defense against attacks on this precious property, but little by little, we learned that we had nothing to fear.
“Our ancestors here on Vrysi lived in flimsy houses when they first arrived. But ours, as you can see, were of solid construction. We had paved walkways between our houses so too much mud wouldn’t accumulate.
“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 beautiful clay-plastered walls. We covered our floors with woven mats. Wooden pillars held up.” our high thatched roofs.
“We built stone benches along the walls of our houses and had storage containers made of stone slabs. A large fireplace was the center of each house. At night, our one-room houses were cozy with sunlight. fire and with the glow of oil burning in stone lamps, we made small stone figurines that were honored in our homes, but that is a religious matter, which we do not discuss with strangers.
“My people lived here for more than a hundred generations, until an earthquake made the place unsafe and we moved. For five thousand years since then, the sea has undermined our promontory. In the not too distant future, the sea will swallow”. all the town. Then all that will be left to remember our lives will be the pottery shards, bone needles and stone spindles in the Girne museum in Northern Cyprus.”