ABSTRACT
The foremost channel of transmission of Kyprianos’s mystique to Cypriot sensibility through the generations remains, nevertheless, the epic poetry about the drama of the 9th of July, composed in Cypriot Greek in the late nineteenth century by Vassilis Michaelidis, Cyprus’s national poet. The school of Limassol, which the archbishop so full-heartedly endorsed, transferred to Cyprus the spirit of the Enlightenment on the model of the foremost such institution in the Greek world at the time, the Philological Gymnasium of a Smyrna, where Dimitrios Themistocles had been trained and later taught. In Cyprus, however, at the distant eastern periphery of the Greek world, the Enlightenment was introduced by the Church. In the case of Kyprianos, besides the ecclesiastical Enlightenment outlined above as the primarily pertinent context within which his archiepiscopal strategy should be interpreted, two other contexts should also be considered.
