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

Annemarie Weyl Carr

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,...

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