The Greek Cathedral of Panagia Odigitria in Nicosia: Research Questions and First Findings

Michalis Olympios of the University of Cyprus presents the initial findings of the Historic Bedestan research project on the Greek cathedral of Panagia Odigitria in Nicosia, known in the Ottoman period as the Bedestan. The talk is given in Greek.

Olympios begins by reviewing earlier scholarship on the monument, from Camille Enlart and George Jeffery to the 1930s work of the Department of Antiquities and more recent studies by Michael Willis, Philippe Plagnieux, Thierry Soulard, and Tassos Papacostas. Used from the fifth or sixth century Early Christian period until the Ottoman conquest of 1570, the site preserves an Early Christian basilica beneath fourteenth- to sixteenth-century phases. He outlines the prevailing hypothesis that the Early Christian church was the Byzantine Hagia Sophia, used temporarily by the Latin clergy after 1196 before they moved to the adjacent Gothic cathedral, while the Greek clergy were displaced to St Barnabas under the Bulla Cypria of 1260 before returning to the Odigitria by the mid-fourteenth century.

He then lays out the project's architectural, patronage, and liturgical questions: the relationship between the Early Christian apses and the twin southern aisles, the sixteenth-century retention of a Gothic style on the north facade when Venetian public works in Famagusta used an Italianate idiom, and the multiple portals and secondary altars detected by Peter Megaw in the late 1930s.

Because the political situation in the occupied north prevents new excavation or sampling, the project combines macroscopic study of the masonry with archival work in Venice, the Vatican, Istanbul, and Cyprus. Olympios reports that Nikolas Papacostas's heraldic research indicates the coats of arms on the north portal, aside from that of the Costanzo family identified by Jeffery, belong to Cypriot rather than Venetian houses.

Turning to the 1930s to 1950s files of the Department of Antiquities and the State Archives, Olympios shows Megaw's plans and photographs from when a hotel, a khan, and shops still abutted the church. Early 1940s records document unstratified sculptural fragments, coins, and burials, some now built into the Lapidary Museum wall, including a gilded statue of a saint that Olympios compares with a 1352 Syriac-inscribed Virgin and Child from Cyprus now in Sicily. An unpublished 1939 note by Megaw (in a file still holding a coin from the dig) records wall foundations beneath the colonnade dividing the twin southern aisles, confirming they were built separately in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries and requiring a revision of Willis's plan. A 1940s photograph of the southwest dome pier also reveals an earlier core beneath the Venetian masonry.

In the discussion afterwards, Nasa Patapiou adds prosopographical details on the clergy and icons moved from the Odigitria to Chrysaliniotissa, and Olympios replies to a question on what stood on the site of the Latin cathedral before its construction.