The site of Larnaca was originally colonized by Mycenaeans in the thirteenth century BC, but had declined, like many other Medit rranean towns, by about1000 BC. It emerged again as Kition two centuries later, re-established by the Phoenicians, and resumed its role as a port exporting co er from rich deposits at Tamassos and elsewhere in the eastern Troodhos. A subsequent period of great prosperity was complicated by the city's staunch championing of the Persian cause on Cyprus: Kimon of Athens, heading a fleet sent in 450 BC to reduce Kition, died outside the wall in the hour of what proved to be a transient victory. Persian influence only ended with the Hellenistic takeover of the whole island a century later, a period which also saw the birth of Kition's most famous son, the Stoic philosopher Zeno.
Christianity came early to Kition, traditionally in the person of Lazarus, the man resurrected by Christ at Bethany. Irate Pharisees tried to dispose of the evidence of this miracle by casting Lazarus adrift in a leaky boat; he supposedly landed here to become the city's first bishop and, following his (definitive) death, its patron saint. After an otherwise uneventful passage through the Roman and early Byzantine eras, Kition suffered the same seventh-century Arab raids as other Cypriot coastal settlements. It didn't really recover until the end of the Lusignan era, when the Genoese appropriation of nearby Farnagusta prompted merchants to move here to take advantage of the small port; by now the anchorage was called Salina or Les Salines, after the salt lake just inland.
The name Larnaca, derived from lamax (a sarcophagus or urn, of which there were plenty to hand from various periods of the town's past), only gained wide currency at the start of Ottoman rule. By the eighteenth century Larnaca was the premier port and trade centre of the island, briefly eclipsing Nicosia in population, with numerous foreign consuls in residence. Britain's consul often simultaneously administered the English Levant Company, a trading organization analogous to the British East India Company. Around the consuls gathered the largest foreign community on the island, leading lives of elegant and eccentric provinciality, the inspiration for reams of travel accounts of the time. In 1878 the British landed here to take over administration of Cyprus, and it was not until after World War II that Larnaca again fell behind Famagusta and Limassol in importance.
