Description:
The restoration of the Armenian Church and Monastery aimed to preserve a masterpiece of gothic architecture that suffered from misuse and neglect after the intercommunal tensions that begun in 1963, which caused the Armenian community to leave their historical neighbourhood in Nicosia. The church was in desperate condition and some parts of the structure were nearly collapsed. The ancillary buildings and the site had also undergone heavy decay and suffered from imperfect interventions. The most challenging conservation and stabilization interventions were concentrated on the church, which still maintained noteworthy architectural and decorative elements from the original 1300s construction, including painted plasters, carved bosses and capitals, tracery windows and metal frames that supported the stained--]glasses. Careful removal of the modern cement and gypsum plasters revealed the layout of this church, which is a palimpsest of different construction phases. Minimum intervention and attention to the material authenticity of the construction was achieved through very few substitutions of the decayed stones and were integrally adopted in the structural intervention of the porch, which was nearly collapsed. Its original geometry was recovered without dismantling a single stone.