Cyprus

The Church of Cyprus is one of the oldest autocephalous churches in Christendom. The Council of Ephesus in 431 confirmed its independence from the Patriarchate of Antioch, on the argument that the island had been evangelised by Barnabas and Paul directly rather than through Antioch, and a later tradition connects the confirmation to the discovery of Barnabas's tomb with a copy of Matthew's Gospel on his chest. The Byzantine emperor is said to have granted the archbishop three privileges retained to this day: to wear purple, to carry an imperial sceptre rather than a pastoral staff, and to sign in red ink.

Those privileges became political rather than ceremonial under later rule. The Ottoman administration governed non Muslim subjects through their religious hierarchies, so the archbishop became the ethnarch, the civil head of the Greek Cypriot community, responsible for taxation and representation as well as for the liturgy. The British inherited the arrangement, and it culminated in Archbishop Makarios III leading the movement for union with Greece and then serving as the first president of the republic. A serving archbishop as head of state is rare anywhere and unique in modern Europe.

The Turkish Cypriot community is Sunni Muslim with a historically relaxed observance, and the Hala Sultan Tekke on the salt lake outside Larnaca, associated with Umm Haram, a relative of the Prophet by marriage, is among the more significant Islamic shrines of the eastern Mediterranean. Small Maronite, Armenian and Latin Catholic communities have constitutional recognition as religious groups.

The division of Cyprus in 1974 moved populations but not buildings, and the result is that each community's religious heritage is substantially located where the other community now lives.

Greek Orthodox Cypriots were displaced from the north, leaving behind hundreds of churches, chapels and monasteries, including the monastery of Apostolos Andreas at the far tip of the Karpas peninsula, one of the most important pilgrimage sites on the island. Turkish Cypriots were displaced from the south, leaving mosques, cemeteries and tekkes, including the Hala Sultan Tekke near Larnaca.

What happened to those buildings has been a continuing grievance on both sides, and the accounting is genuinely disputed. Churches in the north were converted to other uses, left to decay or stripped, and there has been a documented international trade in looted Cypriot icons, mosaics and frescoes, including the celebrated case of the Kanakaria mosaics, recovered through litigation in a United States court. Mosques and Muslim cemeteries in the south have suffered neglect and vandalism, less prominently reported outside the island.

There is also a repair effort that gets less attention than the destruction. A bicommunal Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage, working with international funding, has conserved churches in the north and mosques in the south, choosing projects in pairs so that neither community's heritage is restored without the other's. Apostolos Andreas was conserved under that framework and pilgrimages to it resumed.

Access for worship is negotiated occasion by occasion rather than guaranteed, which is why a liturgy or a prayer at a site across the line is reported as news when it happens.