Cyprus Museum is unique! Visitors will feel surprise by the variety of objects shown. Many of them are specific for the island. You can spend hours here, but you can also walk in for just some minutes, to see the gold for example – always one of my favorites 🙂 Entrance is free.
The statues in the two pictures above formed my biggest surprise in Cyprus Museum. Had I known about their existence, I would have paid a visit already years ago. I found out by accident because many visitors came just for these statues. Archaeologists dug them up at the sanctuary of Agia Irina (700-600 BC), 2000 (!) statues all around the altar. Cypriots dit the work together with a Swedish team and part of the findings were donated to the Swedes. You will find them in Stockholm.
The art of exposition
Is Cyprus Museum unique? Yes, already just for this. However, Cyprus Museum can expose these statues so much better. Having such a treasure, originating from your own island deserved a huge room and museum lay-out, just like the pieces in the Archaeological Museum of Amman, Jordan. Some pieces deserve the total headlights, like the Nachtwacht painting of Rembrandt van Rijn in the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam.
Very old gold
Lots of hidden treasures to be discovered in Cyprus Museum. History starts very early here: for jewelry and gold at 7000 BC.
Unique representations
Look at the objects below: these are unique representations. I love them! Unclear what the one on the left is. On the right maybe the very first representation of child birth (Chalcolithic is 3900-2500 BC).
4000 years old plank shaped art
Moreover I was very impressed by the ‘plank shaped’ pottery. The human body is depicted as an entirely flat surface, schematically rendered, on which a variety of details are incised or rendered with paint (Bronze Age 2100-1600 BC). This is so artistic, it could be modern art also. In the Museum Shop they have some jewelry inspired by these plank shaped stuff.
2500 years old daily life
Unique in Cyprus Museum are also the Crypto-Archaic objects (750-475 BC) that show humans in daily life. They are moving in boats, resting on beds, giving birth to children with the help of other women, making bread and playing music. Isn’t that a wonderful look into daily life 2500 years ago!
And and and and and
And of course there is lots of pottery and pots and statues in bronze and cupper, masks, thrones, coins, funerary steles, funerary limestone lions and sphinxes and so on. It is all very old (as you know, I like very old much more than roman or medieval stuff) and worth watching.
Two last top pieces
I finish this blog with two objects I particularly lliked. Glass objects, especially the small and long one that has the top modelled as a pomegranate (1400-1200 BC). And the maybe oldest depicted cat ever, from the stone age. Even in those times they loved cats enough to make a piece of art for them 🙂
Interested in archaeology and museums? You may also like:
Musée National Luxembourg
Musée d’Angoulême France
Huis van Hilde Netherlands
Villa del Casale Sicily
Bardo Museum Tunisia
National Museum Serbia
Archaeological Museum Gaziantep Turkey
Monastery in a divided island
And they show their power by calling the primary school of Dipkarpaz the ‘Recep Tayyip Erdogan School’ and the large square in front of the Apostolos Andreas Monastery the ‘Bülent Ecevit Square’; Ecevit was the Turkish Prime Minister in 1974 who decided to send the army into Cyprus to help the Turkish Cypriots. It is a strange pattern since over 40 years now of Greek Cypriots Always complaining as if they have no role whatsoever in what is happening, and the Turks showing muscles instead of empathy.
the sign to remember that moment is still on the wall inside the church (see the photograph on the right). In 1974 the Island of Cyprus was divided in a Northern and Southern part. The Greek Cypriots inhabitants of the village that then was called Stylloi, went to the South while Turkish Cypriots who lived in Mouttagiaka / Mutluyaka, an old Osman village in the very South of the island, resettled in Stylloi in the North and renamed the village of Stylloi after the village they left.
As the church of Saint Helias is quite new, there is not a lot to tell about it. The amount of concrete used is too big to call it ‘lovely’ like many other Greek churches still are. Inside, it was stripped of almost all objects, as you can see in the photograph I took. 
at the main porch.
On the front side of the church, both the 
Turkish and the Turkish Cypriot flag were present which could indicate some kind of actual use. Alternative activities are not necessarily a disadvantage for a building, although I know that it is hard for Greek Cypriots to see their heritage used for other religious or nationalist purposes. When it comes to preservation, in Northern Cyprus churches that have been used or are still used, often show a much better state of affairs than empty churches that fall into the hands 
(feathers and dirt) of birds, rain and wind. Empty and deserted churches (since 1974 = for decades) have step by step fallen into decay – here are 
mality, the field-like aspect of the place. That spot looks like ‘the middle of nowhere’ and everybody knows nothing happens in the middle of nowhere. So how did these heavy things occur right here? It would be reassuring if a place where very bad things happen, had some kind of special sign or mark. But
there is none. Of course now 
there is a monument and a man made statue in the former mass grave. Information boards tell visitors that abnormal activities took place here; but this information board is broken. Somehow, remembering does not seem to be serious business. It really irritates me to find broken information boards in memorial places like this, like I wrote in the 
‘this monument was erected in memory of these 37 martyrs who did not flee from their village, and defended the honor of the Turkish flag on the cost of their lives‘. I found it difficult to read this text neutrally.
They are not always logical or consistent and that gives it a pure and attractive style. It flows the way locals tell a story and you follow their story line without even breathing.
There is only one lesser thing to tell about the book, and that is the English translation. I am sorry that I did not buy the Turkish version because on several occasions the English translation is so bad that it is difficult to find out what was meant originally. I could have bought even both versions, for 10 TL per book it is very affordable. But I didn’t, alas. Now, I give you my analysis of some aspects of this book.
shows the list of individual names and photographs of these 89 persons and those 
This somehow increases the impression that is made on the observer. Some photographs are vague, it seems that that was the best they could find for the book. At least some memory is given to us, even though it is imperfect.
As a book, there are quite some technical failures – but that is maybe why this book is so interesting. It is pure and it is a direct message both from the deceased and from the survivors. There was clearly nobody ‘in between’ to interprete, to correct or to think about how to get the message across. The message is just the message. Remembering in this book is about hearing and listening to authentic stories.
Other survivors say they saw loose body parts at the excavation, which is, combined with atrocities elsewhere in the Middle East, probably the explanation for the idea that there was decapitation. There are some claims that the attackers threw locals from the mosque, raped the women, dragged them on a rope behind a bus or burned the bodies. There are also claims that victims were buried while still alive.
serves as Şehitler Müzesi, the Martyr’s Museum for Murataga, Sandallar and Atlilar where massacres took place in 1974. I passed this museum by surprise, on my way from the 
There had always been some pressure on the Turkish Cypriot children but the heavy troubles of 1958 chased all Turkish Cypriot children away and forced the last Turkish Cypriot inhabitants of Pigi Peristerona to leave and move to the smaller village of Murataga (in Greek: Maratha). Murataga welcomed the ‘refugees’ and built houses for them. At that time also a school and a mosque were made. Who could imagine that on August 14, 1974, 29 children (their names are in the picture) of that school would be killed, bulldozered and buried in mass graves?
However, what affected me most, was the guide of the museum himself… At the time of the massacre, most Turkish Cypriot men were in camps where the Greek Cypriots kept them as prisoner; some young men like himself had already gone to places where the fights took place, in his case Famagusta (in Turkish: Gazimagusa). While t
hey were absent, the women, the children and the elderly were murdered. The men who survived and returned to Murataga, Sandallar and Atlilar, found out that they lost almost everybody. For the museum guide this meant: his mother, his five sisters and his brother – you can see them in the lower row on the picture to the right – and his aunt and her seven children. Only his father who was a prisoner at the time of the massacre, survived.
difficult to identity. In a recent project to find the many people that were ‘lost’ in the 1963-1974 period – both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, see also 
I found this place thanks to the indication of locals in Alaniçi after a surprising visit to the churches in that village (see my 
I went there. It has a marble monument next to the spot of the former mass grave and what really irritated me, an information board that has fallen to the ground and is left there, neglected. On lifting it, the information was visible and no different from the information at the place of the tombs. But however, either you want to give that information at two spots, then take good care of it, or you just remove it from the second spot. A mass grave is not a place to be so disrespectful, that is really disturbing…