Restoration of Prophet Elias church completed

The maintenance work of the church of Prophet Elias in the Stylloi village in the north has been completed and was delivered on Friday.

The project was co-financed by the European Union along with the community in Famagusta and implemented by UNDP.

In a post on social media, Greek Cypriot co-chairman of the Technical Committee for Cultural Heritage, Sotos Ktoris, said that “according to a newspaper of the time and a relevant inscription on the west entrance, the church was built in 1919. It is the work of Iakovos Pavlos or Mastros Yakoumi, with the church being of large dimensions and morphologically differentiated from the standards of the time’.

He added the bell tower is presumed to have been completed in 1953, which is the year the church was inaugurated.

According to his post, “the biggest challenge for the experts involved in the project was the structural and architectural restoration of the bell tower, which is a unique composite construction of stone and reinforced concrete.”

It is also noted that ‘because of the poor condition of the bell tower, mainly due to the oxidation of the reinforcement and its general vulnerability, it was decided to reconstruct it. The reconstruction used the same construction logic and the original form and dimensions of the existing bell tower’.