Now a fun Cyprus item, Geek Div.

According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for Sunday,

[a]n expedition on the trail of the lost city of Atlantis says it has discovered evidence of man-made structures submerged in the sea between Cyprus and Syria.

Robert Sarmast, who is convinced the fabled city lurks in the watery depths off Cyprus, will give details of his findings this week.

"Something has been found to indicate very strongly that there are man-made structures somewhere between Cyprus and Syria," a spokesperson for the mission told Reuters.

The mystery of Atlantis - both whether it existed and if so, why it disappeared - has fired the imagination of explorers for decades. ...

Theories place Atlantis somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, near the Greek island of Santorini, off the Celtic Ridge of Britain or even further afield in the South China Sea.

Sarmast's theory is that Cyprus is the pinnacle of Atlantis, with the rest of it about 1.6 kilometres below sea level.

That would do a lot for the Cypriot tourism industry, in any event. Personally, based on current evidence I go more for the Spanish location, partly because the arguments for other sites rely in part on persistent cross-cultural stories or a great flood that took place about 11,000 years ago - but the most recent archaeological evidence dates the development of settled villages to about 8,000-9,000 years ago, making the existence of the supposedly advanced Altantian culture with its rumored grand buildings and temples a couple of thousand years earlier at best problematic. (This does not, I hasten to add, undo the flood stories, only their applicability to Atlantis.)