ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1974, shortly before the events that resulted in the division of the island, my wife and I were able to visit and quickly photograph the Armenian Church known as St Mary in Famagusta (Plate 3). A family we assumed was Turkish inhabited the church. The parents were at work and the children, a boy and girl who were both very young adolescents, let us enter and examine the interior (Figure 8.1). The slides and photographs were taken without extra lighting or a tripod. Upon our return to Lebanon, someone at the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia in Antelias, under whose jurisdiction the diocese of Cyprus falls, informed us that the family was in fact probably Armenian. This I could not verify. I was unable to devote time to the study of the church and the medieval frescoes that covered its walls until two years later when I presented a paper on it to the XVth International Byzantine Congress in Athens.1 A second paper followed some years later at the 25th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies at the University of Birmingham.2 Neither paper was published, and the texts or drafts of them appear to have been lost. It is only lately through conferences in Montpellier and Antelias that my interest in this material has been reawakened thanks to Michael Walsh, Nicolas Coureas and Brunehilde Imhaus. More recent work on Famagusta and on the Armenian Church makes me doubt whether my documentation, once interesting because of the timing of our visit, is of much scientific importance. Nevertheless, it seems to me that presenting some of this material, augmented by a survey of the sources and literature in Armenian on the church, might in some small way contribute to the interest in preserving and restoring this monument along with others in Famagusta and elsewhere in Cyprus.
