Cyprus Museum
The island's largest archaeological museum, covering Cypriot material from the Neolithic to Byzantine eras.
The Cyprus Museum grew out of a collection assembled from 1882 onwards, when islanders and British administrators sought to halt the export of antiquities. A permanent home was begun in 1908 and completed in 1924, built in a restrained neoclassical manner to a design associated with N. Balanos of the Archaeological Society of Athens. The building stands on Mouseiou Street just outside the Venetian walls of the old city, opposite the site of the former Nicosia general hospital, and is run by the Department of Antiquities.
Fourteen galleries are arranged chronologically and thematically, and display only material excavated on Cyprus. The sequence runs from Neolithic Khirokitia through the Chalcolithic, Bronze Age, Geometric, Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods to the early Byzantine centuries. Pottery, bronzes, seals, coins, jewellery and funerary sculpture are shown alongside reconstructed tomb groups. A new, much larger archaeological museum has been under construction nearby, intended eventually to take over the collections.
Highlights
- Some two thousand terracotta votive figures from the sanctuary at Ayia Irini
- Chalcolithic picrolite cruciform figurines from Lemba and Yialia
- Roman marble statues from the gymnasium at Salamis
- Reconstructed royal tomb chambers from Salamis with bronze fittings
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