ABSTRACT
Ludolf von Suchen, also in the fourteenth century, marvelled at how such cosmopolitanism was not only tolerated, but actually nurtured in Famagusta, when he recorded ‘the tongues of every nation under heaven are heard and read and talked: and all are taught in special schools’.3 The resultant art of Famagusta, far from being regional, and hermetically sealed from developments further afield, embodied ‘a culture that [found] its identity in its ability to manage multiplicity, to admit varied languages at a high level of both quality and integrity’.4 The paintings, in consequence, were those of a sophisticated ‘multicultural and multi-confessional society’.5 Today, read correctly, they act as a unique lens through which to observe and analyse cultural spheres of contact (often overlapping) in Famagusta and through which insights into patterns of assimilation, confrontation and segregation within the societal models of the island can be attempted.6 They yield information on how these communities identified themselves, and offer the scholar a chance to understand the amalgam of influences that led to something greater than the mere superimposition of other cultures onto those of Cyprus. Of course, this is a complex task in a port city like Famagusta, to the point that Rupert Gunnis suggested that familiarity with Byzanto-Italian traditions, the influences from the Caucasus and Armenian, and the method of arrival through Constantinople, Salonica, Crete, Genoa or Venice, all had to be borne firmly in mind. S. Hatfield Young stressed this too, and in so doing emphasized the importance of appreciating how the ‘western’ influences passed through the culturally diverse filters of Syria, Palestine and Lebanon, before making landfall in Cyprus.7 All of this, juxtaposed with the dominance of an indigenous visual vocabulary, led Carr to ask:
2 James of Verona in Excerpta Cypria, ed. C.D. Cobham (Cambridge, 1908), 17. 3 Ludolf von Suchen in Excerpta Cypria, p. 20. 4 A.W. Carr, ‘Art in the Court of the Lusignan Kings’, in Cyprus and the Crusades,
ed. N. Coureas and J. Riley-Smith (Nicosia, 1995), 251. 5 M. Bacci ‘Syrian, Palaiologan, and Gothic Murals in the “Nestorian” Church of
Famagusta’, Deltion tes christianikes archaiologikes Hetaireias (2006), 209. 6 J.G. Schryver, ‘Spheres of Contact and Instances of Interaction in the Art
and Archaeology of Frankish Cyprus, 1191-1359’ (unpublished PhD diss., Cornell University, 2005), 178-9.
