We are in Larnaca, a city where at the beginning of the 20th century Art Deco was the central thoroughgoing theme in architecture. The fashion for this new international style, a laconic version of Art Nouveau, was inspired by the wanderings and journeys that have been associated with the Greeks for four millennia.

Art Deco spread after the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925 — on both sides of the Atlantic, in the USA, Europe, the USSR and the British Empire.

Marko Kiessel, a scholar, was right to describe this style as a “dominating modernist variant of the 1930s–1940s in Cyprus.” It can be revealed both in the skyscraper of Kostas Manglis (Manglis Tower) on the main street of Nicosia and in the lavish cinemas of that era.

Most of all it took the fancy of builders and owners of individual residential buildings, becoming part of the modern urban idiom — together with neoclassicism and modernism.

The style was commissioned with enthusiasm by Cypriots, Englishmen and also Armenian families — refugees from the Ottoman Empire, both as imposing houses for wealthy people and as simple townhouses, where its only feature may be an elaborate ornamentation pattern of the lattice of the entrance doors.

The architect Yirgos Demetriou, who consulted me, believes that most of these buildings were created by unknown English designers from the colonial Public Works Department (PWD). This fact of anonymity enhances the impression. You and I can feel like pioneers exploring an endangered aesthetic species!

Now the city is going through dramatic changes, losing its heritage — houses are being disappearing, demolition after demolition. It loses face. The Municipal Market (1936), a masterpiece of one of the pioneers of modernism, Polyvios Michaelides, was demolished in 1996; in the last year alone, several houses on Markou Drakou and Orfeos Streets have disappeared.

This route, with an emphasis on monuments that have never been included in guidebooks before (because they do not refer to neither antiquity nor neoclassics), is a tribute to the love of the city and its elegance of the first half of the 20th century, which can still be felt.

Most of the private houses along the route are condemned to demolishment and would soon disappear without city stakeholders take action.
Please, while walking along the route, post photos of these fated buildings on your social networks with the tags #VanishingHomes and #SaveCyprusArchitecture.

I would like to thank my colleagues with whom I shared these thoughts while shaping the texts for this route — engineer Andreas Karakatsanis, historians of art: Emilia Siandou, Clem Cecil, Gayane Kazaryan & Dr.Alexey Petukhov.