+ New Cyprus Archaelogical Museum ₂₀₁₇

In collaboration with Kalliope Kontozoglou Architects

Looking at the past in order to find what led to what we are today is archaeology. An archaeological museum packages our heritage in an intelligent manner, conducive to logical and emotional dissemination.

It is a social space, a topos, where the narrative of the past, but also its subconscious pro­jection into the future, is enacted. Visitors interact with meanings from the past through both their logical perception of the artefacts and their emotional responses to their material pres­ence. In Cyprus in particular, “a place where the miracle is still possible” (Seferis), the history of the people is mythically grounded in their landscape.

The museum is a ‘contact zone’ where new interpretations of this history and pre-history are enacted. One can display a Cypriot amphora as simultaneously an everyday life object, an object with specific functions in a religious festival, and as something that evokes a history of struggle through its iconography.

It is a reflection of the archaeological process. A dialogue is built between material culture and its social space. Exhibits and the new building position the visitor in order for him/her to make intuited narrative sense of them - in this, the museum speaks as much of us as of the dead society that produced the artifacts, it conjures a ‘poetics of the past’.

As Cyprus was the host of many diverse civilisations and served as the melting pot of influenc­es, so its museum becomes a social catalyst for the creation of the future culture.

The New Cyprus Museum does not project a single image or meaning, but conveys them through ‘riddles’. It is a ‘sphinx’, its ‘head’ tilted to the side, towards the city, like the C6th Cypriot Sphinx in the Louvre. It is inviting the visitor to at­tempt to solve the riddles posed by its antiquities. As a topos, it allows the visitor to remember the whole Nicosia, the whole Cyprus. It consists of superimposed strata and horizons. The museum frames and reveals the topography of the city: the gentle landscape with the river and the hen­decagon, a symbol of the walls, nest within it in a newly created microcosm.