Hybridity, transculturality and eclecticism in the art and architecture of the Latin East

Michalis Olympios of the University of Cyprus examines the theoretical concepts used by nineteenth- to twenty-first-century scholars to assess cross-cultural contact and artistic production in the medieval and early modern Eastern Mediterranean, focusing on Lusignan and Venetian Cyprus, Venetian Crete, and the Frankish Peloponnese.

The lecture begins with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiography, which adopted taxonomic methods from biology alongside nationalist frameworks equating style with national character. Olympios contrasts Camille Enlart, who praised the French Gothic cathedrals of Cyprus while dismissing mixed Byzantine-Gothic monuments in Greece, with Byzantinists such as Georgios Sotiriou and Andreas Stylianou, who stressed the continuity of Greek Cypriot culture or read Franco-Byzantine architecture as Greek resistance.

From the 1970s and 1990s, social history and postcolonial theory detached style from ethno-religious identity and introduced hybridity. Olympios illustrates this shift with the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century murals in the Latin, Greek, Armenian, and Syrian churches of Famagusta, where painters trained in the Palaiologan style drew on a shared repertoire of motifs, and with archival evidence from Venetian Candia. He critiques hybridity for presupposing pure parent traditions and lacking historical depth, citing the mid-sixteenth-century church of Agia Marina at Potamiou, where Syro-Palestinian and Venetian motifs had already been absorbed into a local Cypriot idiom.

Turning to Wolfgang Welsch's concept of transculturality, Olympios examines St George of the Greeks in Famagusta and the Panagia Odigitria in Nicosia, which adapted urban Gothic forms and microarchitecture while incorporating earlier Byzantine and Early Christian remains. After comparing European synagogues and Protestant temples, he proposes reviving the philosophical and eighteenth-century concept of eclecticism. The discussion afterwards addresses local masons, rural churches such as Lysos, and Peter Megaw's 1930s and 1940s discovery of statues inside the Panagia Odigitria.