Nicosia's €144m new Cyprus Museum will not be delivered before 2028, MPs told

The new building for the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia will not be delivered before 2028, MPs on the House education committee heard on 30 September 2026 at a meeting with Deputy Culture Minister Clea Papaellina. The building had been due by 3 February 2027, and the committee's chairman, Chrysanthos Savvides of Diko, said it looked as if visitors would not get in before 2030. A week later, on 7 October, Papaellina and the Minister of Transport, Communications and Works, Evie Tsolaki, toured the construction site.

What the committee heard

MPs were also told that work on the museum's amphitheatre had been held up because its budget was stuck at the finance ministry. In a separate item, an official said shelters planned over the Unesco-listed mosaics at Nea Paphos could not go ahead because of technical and legal problems; Savvides pointed out that the floors have stood open to the weather for decades.

The timetable had already slipped before the hearing. Works began in January 2023 under the Iacovou-Cyfield joint venture, with completion first set for 9 June 2026; by May 2026 the contractor had asked for 500 more days, a request the government said it would assess. The project costs about €144 million, lent in two shares of €72 million by the European Investment Bank and the Council of Europe Development Bank under agreements set for signature in February 2025.

The building and the museum it replaces

The design is by Theoni Xanthi of XZA Architects, who won the international competition for it in 2017. It stands on a triangular plot of nearly 40,000 m² near the medieval walls, bounded by Chilonos, Nehrou and Pedieos River streets, with 30,000 m² built. The galleries sit in three raised volumes, which the architects call Place, Sea and World: the first settlers and their land, the sea, and contacts across the Mediterranean.

The museum was founded in 1882, and its present home on Museum Street came out of an earlier competition, in 1906, won by Nikolaos Balanos with a facade modelled on the temple of Athena Nike in Athens. Since 1935 it has been run by the Department of Antiquities.