Travel Guide Polis

Situated close to the sea, on the edge of the large bay of Chrysochous ("golden land"), Polis bears a very simple but somewhat pretentious name, meaning "city". In fact, this tourist town is the heir to two great cities. Here, in 1100 BC, the Mycenaean Greeks founded Marion, one of the twelve city-states of Cyprus, which built its wealth on gold mining. Destroyed in -312, during the wars between the successors of Alexander the Great, it was refounded around -270 by the Greek king of Egypt Ptolemy II Philadelphus in honor of his wife Arsinoe... who was also his sister. Arsinoe-Polis fell into obscurity in the Middle Ages, but was reborn during the Ottoman era with a large Turkish Cypriot population. This population was expelled in 1963, first to the nearby village of Prodromi, then definitively in 1974. Today, Polis is the administrative and economic hub of the northern Paphos district, and its main source of income is tourism, thanks to its long beaches and the marina at Latsi. It is also the gateway to the wild Akamas peninsula.