A Byzantine masterpiece recovered, the thirteenth-century murals of Lysi, Cyprus

This book treats the dome and apse paintings pirated from a small Greek Orthodox church isolated in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus in the years following the Turkish invasion of 1974. It lays out a remarkable threefold effort of restoration. First is their restoration, through their rescue from the shadowy underworld of the illegal art market, to public awareness and admiration, as described in Bertrand Davezac's introduction. Second is their physical restoration. Undertaken by Laurence Morrocco, who received the paintings cut by the pirates into thirty-eight segments which had lost their curvature. Morrocco developed techniques of unprecedented sophistication to return the flattened segments to their original shape and then to fit them together so nearly perfectly that the beauties of the work, e.g., the rhythmic waves made by the wings of the angels in the outer ring of the dome, have been preserved. He precisely details here. His uncharted course over four years, capturing its aspect as a perilous adventure. A third restoration unfolds in Annemarie Weyl Carr's text as the paintings are restored to their historical and artistic context. Richly informative about the life and meaning of Byzantine art, the paintings have proved to be even more important in casting light on the culture of Cyprus in the thirteenth century, when Crusader conquerors, native Cypriots, and Middle Eastern immigrants. Joined in a vibrantly creative, symbiotic society. The book shows how crucial it is that we protect artifacts in their own shape and context, restoring them to the worlds that made, used, loved, and found meaning in them.