ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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Vounous-Bellapais, actually Vounoi, is a burial ground of the early and middle Bronze Age (EC1–MC) in the north of the island of Cyprus, which consists mostly of rock chambers.

Position
Vounous-Bellapais is located in the northern foothills of the Kyrenia mountains northeast of the abbey of Bellapais, approximately in the middle between the monastery and the village of Agios Epiktetos, at the same time southeast of Kazaphani on the north slope of a small hill. The main chain of the pentadactylus is separated by a ravine.

History of research
The site is already mentioned by Einar Gjerstad. In 1931–1932, Porphyrios Dikaios, curator of the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia, partially excavated the gravefield after a number of finds were confiscated by the district police in Kyrenia. The finds, as Dikaios was able to ascertain, came from extensive robberies.
The Cyprus Museum financed a short emergency excavation, with donations another excavation campaign was made possible in the same year. A total of 31 tombs were uncovered in 1931 and another 17 tombs in 1932.
In 1933, further excavations took place under the direction of Dikaios and Claude F. Scheffer from the French National Museum. In 1937, James Rivers Stewart studied graves in the eastern part of the necropolis with funding from the British School at Athens.

Cemetery site
Dikaios distinguishes four groups according to their location:
Upper Eastern Group
Upper Western Group
Central group
lower group
Group 1 contains the oldest tombs.

The limestone in the west of the gravefield is quite hard and the grave chambers were accordingly well preserved, while in the east they were mostly collapsed, which, however, largely protected their contents from robbers.

Installation of graves
The graves are immersed in the upcoming limestone. They have a rounded (grave 16, 20, 30) to irregular rounded shape, sometimes also oval (grave 7) or mushroom-shaped (grave 27) and are usually connected to the access shaft by a short corridor. For some tombs (tomb 5, tomb 11), the chamber borders directly on the shaft. The access to the tomb was usually closed by a stone plate, which is sometimes overthrown outside by smaller stones. The chambers are usually quite low (1.20-1.40 m), in individual cases even smaller (tomb 36 with 1.04, tomb 31 with 1.14 m), but there are also chambers in which one could stand upright (tomb 15 is 1.80 m high, tomb 38 1.85 m, tomb 6 1.90 m and tomb 12 2.2 m). The maximum length of the burial chambers is 5.30 m (Tomb 11).

The very richly furnished tomb 15 is characterized by a side chamber to the west, many other tombs (3, 6, 7, 11) had a slight lateral bump, which was apparently laid out to accommodate the various. Tomb 5 has two side chambers, the western with the skeleton of L-shaped form (Dikaois 1940, Fig. 4).
Individual tombs were connected (39)