Energy and Commerce Minister Natasa Pilides on Thursday unveiled the new logo of the Cyprus Handicrafts Centre, part of a wider push to protect the island’s cultural heritage and promote traditional crafts as a profession that can revitalise local communities.
Besides a revamp of the Cyprus Handicraft Centre’s corporate identity, the initiative also covers a new strategic plan being implemented through to 2026.
The aim is to reorganise and modernise the service so that it can serve as a launching pad for entrepreneurship by offering incentives to craftsmen to increase production. The initiative also provides for the operation of a register of Cypriots handicraft workers and designers for direct contact and promotion, the upgrading of the website and creating an e-shop, renovation of the shop at the centre and offering training programmes.
First steps for the setting up of a register involve lacemakers at Lefkara and coincided with the launch in March of embroidery workshops. The pilot programme has seen two Lefkara lacemakers passing on their expertise and art to a group of 10. The programme continues.
These workshops will pick up pace next year under an agreement signed between the ministry and the University of Cyprus to provide training programmes initially for three traditional handicrafts – ceramics, weaving and embroidery. These programmes will be offered by the ministry through the Human Resources Development Agency.
Cabinet has also approved a Cyprus Handicraft Centre pilot programme supporting professional needleworkers to fill a sharp drop in their numbers – from an estimated 500 in the 1970s and 1980s to the current 50, many of them elderly.
The aim is to produce high quality Cypriot embroidery, tapping on techniques recorded in the national list of the intangible cultural heritage and to improve entrepreneurship. The time plan is for the programme to be implemented in 2022.
Other programmes including a pilot weaving workshop at Youri.
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