The English botanist Dr J Sibthorpe, who travelled in Cyprus and collected notes concerning the natural history of the island, describes Paphos and his discoveries at a modern Greek church:

We anchored about eight in the morning about five miles to the cast of Bafo. The town now presents a melancholy ruin; few of the houses being inhabited. In walking through it, we entered the enclosure of a modern Greek church, where we discovered three pillars of the most beautiful Egyptian granite: at four feet from the ground they measured ten feet our inches in circumference; and from the present surface which evidently had been much raised, fifteen feet in height. At the distance, of about forty yards were two smaller pillars; one of them was fluted. This was probably the site of an ancient temple of Venus: near it stood the ruins of a small Gothic chapel, probably Venetian.