Representations of Ships in Cypriot Folk Art

Euphrosyne Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou of the University of Cyprus examines the relationship of Cyprus with the sea from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and traces how ships were depicted in the island's folk art. The lecture, given in Greek, begins with the historical context of maritime traffic and trade during the late Ottoman and British periods.

Although Cyprus is a large island whose population historically relied on agriculture and lived mostly inland, its ports were busy transit centres. In the eighteenth century, Larnaca succeeded Famagusta as the principal port, hosting foreign consulates, European merchants, and an active Ionian Greek community. Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou reviews written sources on ship ownership, which was dominated by foreigners, alongside local exceptions: Kykkos Monastery held shares in two trading vessels, and the Dragoman Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios recorded five ships in his property inventory, three of which were wrecked in 1805, including one at Damietta. She traces the arrival of the first steamship at Larnaca in 1839, regular European shipping lines, and British harbour works from 1878 onwards at Famagusta, Larnaca, Limassol, and Paphos, as well as small-scale boatbuilding, coastal fishing near Ayia Napa, and sponge fishing by boats from Kalymnos.

Turning to visual culture, Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou surveys ship graffiti on medieval monuments and three unexplained ship graffiti found in 1987 on plaster in the house of Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios in Nicosia. In religious art, ships appear in Byzantine Last Judgement frescoes at Asinou, on a thirteenth-century icon of the Virgin, and on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engravings of the Virgin of Kykkos and Chrysorrogiatissa. Secular and folk examples include a 1919 coffee-house wall painting in Peristerona photographed by George Seferis, a nineteenth-century French pendulum clock in the church of Ayios Antonios in Nicosia depicting a sailing ship with an added smoking funnel, a mudbrick wall painting of a paddle steamer from Pera Orinis, and a stone relief of a paddle steamer carved by Sophronios Charalambous in Mitsero. Further examples appear on a carved wooden shelf with mermaids, a painting by the shadow-puppeteer Christodoulos Paphios, a pithos from Kato Drys stamped with a ship dated 1801, an embroidered tablecloth in the Yeroskipou museum, and three incised gourds decorated with a mermaid, a paddle steamer from Varosha dated 1910, and a 1946 bombing scene from Peyia.

Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou concludes that despite constant shipping at the ports, ships remained rare in Cypriot folk art and song, reflecting the inland, agricultural mentality of what she calls a "land island". In the discussion afterwards, Stella Demesticha, Maria Iacovou, and Demetrios Michaelides compare this modern pattern with coastal life and iconography in antiquity.