Every
Symposium

Under a new mayoral vision, the seventh edition was proclaimed "Northern Cyprus's gateway to the world." Twenty international artists from Turkey, Sweden, Italy, France, Russia, and the USA worked alongside fifty local ceramicists and academics in the open-air workshops, creating terracotta works in real-time each evening from five until eleven under the Mediterranean night sky.

Mayor Ceyhun Kırok announced plans for a permanent exhibition space — a year-round home for the replicas produced across seven years of symposia. The exhibition and closing ceremony on September 14th drew hundreds to the necropolis, reinforcing the site's transformation from a dormant archaeological footnote into a living cultural landmark.

The sixth edition was the most technically adventurous yet. Alongside the Bronze Age updraught kilns, artists experimented with copper matte raku — pulling glowing pots from the kiln to produce iridescent metallic surfaces — the Slavic obvara technique of dunking hot ceramics into fermented yeast baths, and the horsehair method where feathers, leaves, and strands of hair are pressed onto scorching surfaces, branding permanent black patterns into the clay.

Evenings glowed with bonfire pit firings and the twin-chambered kilns casting long shadows across the necropolis. An exceptionally dry summer brought fire warnings that delayed some firings — a reminder that the land still dictates the rhythm. On bread day, the whole camp paused to bake traditional hellim-and-olive loaves in the communal oven, a ritual now as fixed as the firings themselves.

School groups toured the site to learn about prehistoric craft, and finished works entered travelling exhibitions loaned to schools, public buildings, and resort hotels — carrying the story of Vounous far beyond the necropolis walls.

The largest gathering yet. Seventy artists and academics from Ireland, Italy, Latvia, the USA, France, Germany, Iran, Turkey, and Northern Cyprus converged on the necropolis. The repertoire expanded beyond Bronze Age red polished ware into Mycenaean, Etruscan, Hellenistic, and Roman ceramic traditions — four thousand years of Mediterranean craft explored in a single fortnight.

New workshops appeared: glass bead-making using primitive techniques, lustreware preparation and application, and bronze casting with hand-operated bag bellows. At the opening ceremony on September 9th, a theatrical king descended from the surrounding hills with his entourage, to be crowned with a gold replica crafted by archaeometallurgist Giovanna Fregni — a moment that blurred the line between archaeological re-enactment and living art.

Local clay, gathered by Rauf Ersenal's team from the valleys around Çatalköy, remained at the heart of every piece. The exhibition on the closing night drew dignitaries, diplomats, and hundreds of visitors, confirming the symposium's place on the international cultural calendar.

Three years of enforced absence. The pandemic had shuttered borders and silenced the kilns since the third edition in 2019. When the fourth symposium finally opened on September 8th, the feeling at the necropolis was less a conference and more a reunion — potters embracing across worktables, the hiss of the first fire a collective exhale.

Sixty-four academician artists from Cyprus and abroad picked up where they had left off. Seven academic papers were presented alongside the hands-on work, and for the first time, Prof. Dr. Sevim Çizer's groundbreaking terra sigillata research yielded a glossy sigillata primer made from Cypriot earth — the island's own soil producing the lustrous red surface that once defined Roman luxury ceramics. Bronze melting and casting returned, and hundreds of visitors from across the island streamed through the site, many encountering the project for the first time.

The return proved something: the symposium was no longer just an event. It was an institution.

The third edition pushed beyond clay. Copper — the metal that gave Cyprus its ancient name — took centre stage alongside ceramic work, echoing the arsenical copper spirals and bronze tools found in the original Vounous tombs. Artists reproduced faience beads and necklaces modelled on those excavated from the Early Bronze Age graves, reviving a craft that had been dormant on the island for millennia.

Rauf Ersenal's vision for an open-air museum began to take physical shape: permanent reed-and-cane workshop huts modelled on Bronze Age architecture now dotted the hillside, and plans for artist residencies and year-round masterclasses were laid out. Nobody knew it then, but this would be the last symposium before the world shut down — making every firing, every shared meal under the carob trees, a memory held tighter in retrospect.

The second edition expanded the craft. For the first time, bronze casting joined the programme — local clays shaped into moulds and crucibles, a charcoal furnace fed by hand-pumped bag bellows, molten metal poured under starlight. The updraught kiln, modelled on Bronze Age Cypriot originals, was fired for the first time at the site, its orange glow visible from the village below.

Sevim Çizer delivered a landmark lecture on terra sigillata — the fine, glossy red pottery of the ancient Mediterranean — sharing her experimental research on replicating its clay bodies and firing temperatures. Artists worked late into the night (September heat pushes the hours), shaping red polished ware by oil-lamp light in the reed workshop huts. The finished works were exhibited at the historic Bedesten in Nicosia's old walled city, lit by oil lamps in a ceremony attended by President Mustafa Akıncı — a moment when Bronze Age craft met the highest office in the land.

Documented in the EXARC Journal by archaeometallurgist E. Giovanna Fregni, this edition put the symposium on the international experimental archaeology map.

It started with one man and the earth beneath his feet. For years, Rauf Ersenal had hiked through the mountains of Northern Cyprus searching for the rare clays that had been used to make pottery for millennia — a soft green the colour of fresh olives, the bright red of terra sigillata, and a deep, true black. He processed these clays to recreate the coloured slips that once decorated Bronze Age Vounous pottery, and by 2017 he had assembled eighty artists and craftspeople at the necropolis to prove that the ancient techniques could live again.

Born from an earlier project at Ayia Irini on the island's north-western coast, the inaugural symposium was part archaeology, part art residency, part act of cultural reclamation. The Çatalköy Municipality gave its backing, the High Commission of Monuments approved the site, and for the first time in decades the hillside above the Bronze Age tombs was alive with the smell of woodsmoke and wet clay. The mission was direct: reproduce the terracotta artefacts that had been excavated and scattered to museums across the world, and bring them home.

Eighty pairs of hands. Local soil. The same earth the Bronze Age potters had once worked. Vounous was awake again.