Plans for the Corpus of the Mosaics of Cyprus

In this paper, given in Greek at the annual review of the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus for 2017, Emeritus Professor Demetrios Michaelides sets out his plans for a complete corpus of the mosaics of Cyprus. Michaelides began studying Cypriot mosaics in 1970 while working with Michael Loulloupis at the House of the Gladiators at Kourion, and later succeeded Ino Nicolaou, to whose memory the day's conference is dedicated, as Cyprus's representative to the Association Internationale pour l'Étude de la Mosaïque Antique (AIEMA).

Michaelides contrasts the mid-twentieth-century view of Terence Bruce Mitford and the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, when Cypriot mosaics barely registered in scholarship, with the present picture: discoveries now extend beyond the coastal cities into inland sites such as Nicosia and Akaki and up into the Troodos range as high as Lagoudera. He reviews earlier corpora and studies, including the 1974 volume by Stylianos Pelekanidis and Panagiota Atzaka (which included eighteen Early Christian buildings on Cyprus), the Sorbonne doctoral thesis of Fryni Hadjichristofi on Early Christian mosaics, and the 2012 doctoral corpus of 245 floor mosaics compiled by conservator Eleftherios Charalambous.

Modelled on the French and Tunisian corpora, Michaelides's own catalogue covers all techniques included by AIEMA under the term mosaic, such as opus tessellatum, opus musivum, opus sectile and opus spicatum, on both floors and walls, from the early Hellenistic, Roman and Early Christian periods down to Frankish and Venetian rule. Organized by district, town or village, and building, it also gathers fragments in museum stores, small pieces taken abroad as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century souvenirs (now in the Hermitage in St Petersburg and in the Harvey Mudd collection at the University of Southern California), and lost mosaics known from travelers' accounts and archives, starting with Oldřich Prefát at Salamis in 1563. He shows newly rediscovered photographs in Berlin of the lost Orpheus mosaic excavated at Salamis in 1882 by Max Ohnefalsch-Richter, and pre-restoration photographs and notes in the Peter Megaw archive at the University of Cyprus recording the apse mosaics of Panagia Angeloktisti at Kiti and of Panagia tis Kyras at Livadia in Famagusta district, the latter completely destroyed after the Turkish invasion of 1974. In the discussion afterwards, in response to Maria Iacovou, he explains why he doubts the Cypriot provenance attributed to a portable emblema inscribed "Chaire" at a villa in Beaulieu-sur-Mer built by one of the Reinach brothers.