1st Graduate Forum for Mediterranean Archaeology: The fresco in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Famagusta

Presented at the 1st Graduate Forum for Mediterranean Archaeology hosted by the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus, this paper examines a fragmentary medieval fresco in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Famagusta (known in Turkish as Sinan Pasha Camii). The chair's introduction is cut off at the start of the talk, leaving the speaker unnamed.

The building is identified as the Church of Saints Peter and Paul through the 1571 map of Famagusta engraved in Brescia by Stefano Gibellino, which Camille Enlart used to identify the city's medieval churches. Its foundation is placed around the middle of the 14th century, during the reign of Hugh IV or Peter I, though whether it was built for the Latin or an Eastern rite remains debated. A 1520 account by Francesco Attar notes that the building was by then used as a granary, providing a terminus ante quem for its painted decoration.

The paper focuses on a monochrome fresco fragment showing a crowded group of men in poses of suffering, previously interpreted by scholars as the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste. The speaker questions this identification on several grounds: the theme had declined in late Byzantine painting; monumental examples are almost absent from the Latin West and the Syrian Christian tradition; manuscript miniatures of the Forty Martyrs from both traditions use a different iconography; and the monochrome palette is unusual for that subject.

Instead, the speaker proposes that the fragment belongs to the Torments of the Damned within a larger Last Judgment composition. The paper compares the Famagusta figures with Palaiologan Last Judgment cycles, above all the parekklesion of the Chora Church in Constantinople (1315 to 1321) and the Church of Christ Pantokrator at the Dečani monastery in Serbia (1338 to 1347). In both, the panel of "the worm that sleepeth not" shows tangled figures with elongated bodies, oval faces, wrinkled foreheads, broad noses and crossed arms closely matching the Famagusta fragment. The speaker concludes by arguing that a Last Judgment scene fits the church whether it belonged to the Latin rite or to Syrian Christians (such as Nestorians), citing earlier Syrian monumental examples at Mar Musa al-Habashi and Hamatoura.