Five potters run a free clay workshop at Nicosia's Giabra Pierides museum on 15 November

Children from the age of 6 and adults can model and throw clay with five potters at the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation in Nicosia on Sunday 15 November 2026, from 11:00, in a free workshop tied to the collections of the Museum of the George and Nefeli Giabra Pierides Collection. The Foundation, which runs the museum, announced the workshop, "From Ancient Artifacts to Contemporary Art", as the closing event of its "Moments at the Museum '26" series; it is organised with the Cyprus Association of Potters and Ceramists.

The session will start with a short walk through the galleries, where each potter presents the object they will be making with the group, so that participants can choose an activity in advance. Work then moves to the museum's Education Room. There participants rotate through three workstations until their piece is finished. The workshop lasts two and a half hours.

The teachers are Zoi Mavrogenous and Evelina Hatzigeorgiou (pottery), Maria Aloneftou (the wheel), Styliana Dimitriou (sculpture) and Andreas Fasoulides, whose field is early pottery and kilns. Places are limited, and must be reserved by telephone on 22128175 or 22128163.

A kiln in the amphitheatre

Outside, in the Foundation's open-air amphitheatre, Fasoulides will show how a mould for an ancient vase is made and will build a simple kiln by traditional methods. This part is open to every visitor, booked or not.

Most prehistoric pottery on Cyprus was fired in open fires and pits, and built kilns are rare before the Late Bronze Age (see pottery kilns and firing). The one prehistoric potter's workshop known on the island, at Ambelikou-Aletri, had a firing structure that its excavator, Porphyrios Dikaios, called a "primitive" kiln. Jennifer Webb and David Frankel, who published his excavation in 2013, read it as probably an unroofed enclosure walled on three sides, in which fuel and pots were stacked in alternating layers [1, p. 116].

The collection behind the session

The museum shows more than 600 Cypriot antiquities and is strongest in Mycenaean pictorial pottery and limestone sculpture. Its core descends from the collection Demetrios Pierides formed at Larnaca in the 19th century. When he died in 1895 the Mycenaean vases passed to his son Kyprael, known as Giabra, and stayed with his descendants in Nicosia (see the Pierides family collection). The Foundation has housed that share of the collection since 1999.