Anna Marangou calls for pedestrian streets linking Nicosia's old and new Cyprus Museums

The archaeologist Anna Marangou wants the authorities to tie four places in Nicosia together with pedestrian streets, trees and shade: the public garden, the old Cyprus Museum, the new Cyprus Museum and the linear park. She made the case in an essay published on 18 October, written after the theatre group ΣΕΖΟΝ Γυναίκες used the museum's galleries as the set for a performance of Natalie Haynes's Stone Blind, a retelling of the Medusa myth.

In Marangou's account, a letter of 10 May 1882 to the editor of the Cyprus Herald from Horatio Herbert Kitchener, an army officer then mapping the island, led to a memorandum to the High Commissioner, Sir Robert Biddulph. The Kadi of Cyprus, Archbishop Sofronios and the Mufti signed it, and the museum was founded that June with Kitchener as Curator and honorary secretary. Finds were still divided between the government, the landowner and the excavator under the Ottoman law of 1874, which the British kept until the law of 1905 declared antiquities state property.

From 1889 the collections filled a house on Victoria Street, in the Armenian quarter of the walled city, rented for £21 a year; the public was admitted only on Saturday afternoons. Queen Victoria's death in 1901 led the colonial government to plan a museum in her memory. Nikolaos Balanos won the competition with a front copied from the temple of Athena Nike, and George Jeffery supervised the building, which Marangou says was begun in 1908 and handed over in 1926.