About the inventory

Organization

The material in this inventory is presented under a number of headings, as follows:

Location: Details are given for remote or little known churches, and information on the settlement in which they stand. Toponyms are transliterated following the author’s own rules; for standard, and other documented forms, see the relevant entry in the Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus, at http://www.cyprusgazetteer.org/.

Description: All monuments in the areas under the control of the Republic of Cyprus were visited and their description is based on first-hand inspection. This is not the case of the monuments in areas outside the Republic’s control, whose description is based solely on published material. Comment on the function of churches is given only when relevant material survives. The description pertains only to building phases datable to the mid-7th to late 12th-century period and not any earlier or later phases.

Dating: Just like the description, the dating concerns only mid-7th to 12th-century building phases. Most often the dating is very uncertain, and it is frequently based on the date of the earliest surviving fresco decoration.

Later additions / alterations: These concern post-12th century and modern unauthorised interventions.

Modern repairs: Information is provided on excavations and repairs (not modern unauthorised interventions), from reports published in: BCH from 83 (1959) onwards; AR in JHS 72 (1952)-79 (1959) [by A. H. S. Megaw]; AJA occasionally; AD 20 (1965), 22 (1967), 24 (1969), 26 (1971) and 29 (1973/74); ARDA and its predecessors since 1912, with gaps before 1949 [RCAM from 1912 to 1927, ARCAM in 1928 and 1929, Cyprus Monuments. Historical and architectural buildings 3-6 (1931-35), all by G. Jeffery; ARCA for 1914, 1915 and 1916, by M. Markides; Cyprus Museum Annual Report for 1933, by P. Dikaios; RDAC for 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937-39 (publ. 1951), 1940-48 (publ. 1958)]

Early literature: This section contains mentions in sources (mostly early modern travellers’ accounts) and non-scholarly literature before the early 20th century.

Views: Information is given for obscure or inaccessible churches, for those whose state has changed (as a result of deterioration or restoration) and for monuments in the areas not currently under the control of the Republic of Cyprus. Only published material is included.

Plan / section: Bibliographical references are made to published plans and to unpublished material held in the archives of the Department of Antiquities (Nicosia). The quality of the published measured drawings varies, from excellent to very poor. Such drawings were mostly published by C. Enlart, G. Jeffery, G. Soteriou (mostly drawn by J. Pericleous), A.H.S. Megaw, A. Papageorgiou, A.J. Wharton, and others. Reference is also made to drawings for ten churches prepared for the author’s doctoral dissertation, Papacostas (1999a) and published, without permission, in Chotzakoglou (2005).

People

The project was conceived and developed by Stuart Dunn, Tassos Papacostas and Charlotte Roueché. A number of students helped in preparing the materials for publication: Simon Ruggiero, Aikaterini Velentza, Maria Papadaki and Alex Rodriguez Suarez, who also undertook the marking-up of the texts in XML. The XML schema was designed by Simona Stoyanova and Valeria Vitale; the website was built, and functionalities developed, by Paul Caton, and the design and interface were developed by Ginestra Ferraro.

Technical

The iBCC site uses Kiln, an open source digital publication framework developed at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. (For documentation on Kiln see here) To the out-of-the-box Kiln installation has been added a custom look and feel, and the default functionality has been augmented with a browse facility that takes advantage of the faceted search options provided by the Solr search engine.