As you first enter along the marble pavements, you feel the elegant colonnaded courtyard must have been the forum, the market place and heart of the city, rather than simply an outbuilding devoted to education and the culture of the body, the ancient Greek version of a school and heath centre. It is now thought there were originally three gymnasia, two for boys and one for girls. The open forecourt was where the boy athletes would exercise and train. Afterwards they would plunge in the cool water of the two pools, watched by the naked white marble statues of their gymnasiarchs or headmasters. These were wealthy citizens who were elected for a one-year term to help with the school"s finances, and also provided the expensive olive oil for body massage for those boys who had won free attendance by scholarship. Today these gymnasiarch statuas have been replaced by women draped in robes, headless to a woman, decapitated by early Christian zealots, the Muslim fundamentalists of their day, who took the statues to be relics of the pagan religion. Nudity offended them, and all bare statues were broken up or tossed into drains. Clothed statues were just tolerable if their faces were removed. Today the most striking statue is the handless and faceless black marble Persephone.
The columns of the porticoes were re-erected many times in the 1950s by the excavators, and on close examination, the apparent harmony of the whole reveals its mixed origins, for it was destroyed and re-erected many times in its history. In the east portico, for example, the Corinthian capitals are too small for their columns, which are taller and larger than this on the other three sides, presumably brought from somewhere else in the city by the later Byzantine builders.The Hellenistic and Roman latrines are situated in the southwest corner of the palaestra, and are the largest on the island. Arranged in a semicircler, with open-plan seating for 44, they strike us today, with our prudishly solitary cubicles, as most improper. The puritanical Christians of the 4th century, too, considered them indecent, and had them walled up.
Beside the gymnasium are the colossal Byzantine baths, an impressive complex of tall chambers with marble and mosaic flooring and underfloor heating so deeply buried in sand they were only discovered in 1926. ?n two of the vaulted arches traces of Roman mosaicw can still be seen, mainly in reds and browns. In the largest mosaic, the central figure is throught to be Apollo with a lyre and quiver below.The walls throughout are of immense thickness, often 3m or more. Columns and capitals lie scattered about, but much of the more elaborate marble carving was taken away and is now on display in the Cyprus Museum of Greek Nicosia. Some of the finds used also to be on display at the Museum of Gazima?usa within the suburb of Varosha. Now they are doubtless heavily cobwebber. The intricate water system, here and in the gymnasium, is a perpetual source of amazement. A 56km (35 mile) aqueduct brought water from the abundant spring at Kytrea(nowDe?irmenlik) to a large tank which can still be seen in the undergrowth. Scholars have estimated that this water system could supply the needs of 120,000 people.