ABSTRACT

On the island of Cyprus, the remains of more than 50 Gothic churches still stand or are partially standing. These churches, first built in the 13th and 14th centuries, represent a uniquely large corpus of medieval stone-vaulted architecture, unmatched by the remains of Frankish buildings. In this chapter, the remains of these Latin churches are examined through the lens of seismic hazard to assess whether or not changes in their architectural style might be a local adaptation of French Gothic style in response to successive seismic disasters. Many Latin and Greek churches on Cyprus have undergone an accretion of structure over time. The Latin churches built on Cyprus adapted to medieval disasters, namely earthquakes, through an evolutionary process of trial and error and a renewed sense of ‘conformist bias’ to local Byzantine and Islamic models, which had evolved over centuries to mitigate seismic hazard.