‘CoNUNdrum: Gleanings from 800 square metres of Salvage Excavation at the Cistercian Nunnery of St Theodore in Nicosia, Cyprus’

The Cistercian nunnery of St Theodore, excavated in the mid-2000s at the site of Nicosia’s new Supreme Law Courts building, remains at present the only house of the White Nuns in the late medieval Eastern Mediterranean to have received sustained archaeological and architectural-historical scrutiny. Consequently, although trying to piece together a coherent narrative out of data retrieved in the course of a salvage operation plagued by severe time and space constraints has presented significant challenges, the latter were far outweighed by the insights gained into the material world of Latin women religious beyond Western Europe and into virtually uncharted facets of the medieval architectural heritage of Cyprus and its broader region. This talk will examine questions of spatial organization, building design, date, topography and patronage to show that, while the architecture of the abbey of St Theodore was no match for the kingdom’s wealthiest and most celebrated male monastic houses in terms of elaboration and grandeur, it was comparable to what is known of the fragmentary enclosures of several urban friaries. This realisation does not only help evaluate the ways in which these buildings served as a material expression of the social status of St Theodore’s aristocratic nuns (and their supporters), but also brings into sharper focus a register of Cypriot Gothic architecture that has so far received short shrift in the specialist literature.