That's a lot of olive oil!

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Today we had one of the highlights of the tour: a visit to the site that our tour leader Kevin is working on. It's a town from the Late Bronze Age (about 1400-1200 BC) that has a very large building in it that looks rather like a palace. Whoever ruled the place based his wealth on olive oil: one room in this building held around 40 giant jars of olive oil, and there were two large areas of the building that seem to have been used to produce oil on an industrial scale. There are letters from the "King of Cyprus" to the Pharaoh of Egypt at this time, and Kevin speculates that the Cypriot king may have lived in this "palace".

We also visited the really lovely village nearby where Kevin and Sheri go for dinner every evening with their students during excavation season. There's actually a mosque in the village that hasn't been used since partition in 1974, but which the locals take good care of in case the Turkish Cypriots eventually return.

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