People usually look for Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean, sometimes in the Aegean Sea, off the coast of Santorini. Hardly anyone thinks of Cyprus.
And yet, for over twenty years, there has been a theory that claims exactly that—and it has just, in the winter of 2025, made an unexpected comeback.
The Discovery of 2004
In 2004, American architect Robert Sarmast presented sonar measurements taken from the sea southeast of Cyprus, in the direction of Syria. At a depth of about 1,500 meters, the measurements revealed a hill with structures resembling ramparts and moats.
Sarmast's theory: Cyprus was the highest, never-flooded part of Atlantis. The rest of the legendary civilization sank into the eastern Mediterranean around 9000 B.C.
He supported the theory with additional evidence—the island’s rich copper deposits, the now-extinct Cypriot dwarf elephant, and local traditions such as the Kataklysmos Festival, which to this day commemorates a great flood. The partially submerged ancient port city of Salamis on Cyprus’s east coast was also occasionally cited in this context as an example of “sunken places”—not as key evidence, but as proof that land loss to the sea on this island is not a purely hypothetical phenomenon.
Scholarly Criticism
The established research community reacted with caution or outright rejection.
The structures that have been measured are buried beneath layers of sediment; there has never been any evidence of an artificial origin. And historically, the city of Salamis cannot be traced back any further than the 11th century B.C.—millennia too late for Plato’s dating of Atlantis to around 9600 B.C.
Among archaeologists, Sarmast's theory is still considered a fringe view rather than an accepted scientific finding.
2025: A Return, Without the Word “Atlantis”
In November 2025, Sarmast was back in Cyprus—with new material, a new book, and a remarkably different approach.
This time, he almost completely avoids using the term “Atlantis.” His new project, the “Latakia Ridge Research Institute,” focuses on a single, clearly defined anomaly on the so-called Latakia Ridge, a few kilometers beyond the area investigated in 2004. Using AI-assisted mapping, Sarmast claims to have identified a highly ordered, geometric structure there at a depth of about 500 meters.
His own wording during the presentation at the University of Cyprus was strikingly cautious: “We are not announcing the discovery of a sunken city. We are announcing a very specific, highly structured anomaly that we cannot yet explain—and we invite the scientific community to help us investigate it.”
The plan now is to conduct core drilling, high-resolution sonar surveys, and ROV camera inspections on site—funded by a budget that, according to Sarmast, could range from the low to high millions.
Classification
What remains is a fascinating but unproven story.
Experts continue to consider the likelihood that the seabed off the coast of Cyprus actually contains the remains of a lost civilization to be very low. Even Sarmast himself has now deliberately distanced himself from the grand Atlantis narrative and prefers to speak of an open, as yet unresolved geological question.
And yet this very story fits perfectly with an island that—through Teucer, Salamis, and the royal tombs with their Homeric-style burial rites—has already demonstrated just how closely myth and archaeological discovery can be intertwined here. Whether geology or legend ultimately proves correct, Cyprus remains a place where both stories can apparently be told particularly well.