Byzantine Museum and Art Galleries
Byzantine icons, frescoes and repatriated Kanakaria mosaics inside the Archbishopric in old Nicosia.
The Byzantine Museum occupies part of the new Archbishop's Palace, a neo-Byzantine building raised between 1956 and 1960 beside the cathedral of Saint John in the walled city. Opened in 1982 by the Archbishop Makarios III Foundation, it gathers the largest collection of Cypriot religious art on the island: more than three hundred icons, wall paintings, liturgical vessels, embroidered vestments and manuscripts spanning the fourth to the nineteenth centuries. The same complex houses the Archbishopric library and separate galleries of European, Greek and Cypriot painting.
Among the best known holdings are fragments of the sixth-century mosaics from the church of Panagia Kanakaria in the Karpas peninsula, stolen after 1974, traced abroad and returned to Cyprus after litigation. Detached wall paintings rescued from other churches in the occupied north are displayed alongside them. The museum reopened in March 2025 after a lengthy refurbishment that rearranged the collection chronologically and introduced digital interpretation, including three-dimensional projections of individual objects.
Highlights
- Repatriated sixth-century mosaic fragments from Panagia Kanakaria
- Over three hundred Cypriot icons from the ninth to nineteenth centuries
- Detached wall paintings rescued from churches in the occupied north
- Art galleries of European, Greek and Cypriot painting in the same complex
