The Church of St. Lazarus in Larnaka

It had been quite a few years since I had the chance to talk to student about the church of Ay. Lazarus in Larnaka on Cyprus. Yesterday, I chatted a bit about the church and its history with students from Reed College and Metro State University – Denver who were participating in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (Version 3).

This church is a pretty amazing building made only more amazing because it is pretty baffling architecturally and historically. That said, it is also prominent enough in the city of Larnaka and accessible enough to even the casual visitor to make it an appealing building with which to think. Since most of the students had only limited interest in the nitty-gritty of Medieval Cypriot architecture, it made sense to me to talk about the building in more big picture historical ways.

To do this, I decided to focus on how this building embodied a whole series of connections that characterized both the history and contemporary academic conversations about Ancient and Medieval Cyprus. The first connection I make is that the story of Lazarus of Bethany works along side the story of Paul and Barnabas to connect Cyprus (and in the case of Lazarus, Larnaka) to the Levant and Holy Land (which reminds us that ancient Kition was, for most of its history, oriented toward the East). 

Then I discuss the idea that St. Lazarus seemed to be particularly significant to Armenians and propose that the building reflects the connections between Cyprus and Cilician Armenia throughout the Middle Ages from long-standing economic connections between the region to the settlement of Armenians on the island under the Emperors Maurice and Heracleius and the reconquest of the island by Nikitas Chalkoutzes in 965.

I then discuss the how this church connects the city and the island to Constantinople. This connection, of course, works on two levels. First, historically there is evidence that the Emperor Leo VI translated the relics of Lazarus from Larnaka to Constantinople in the first decade of the 10th century. The relics suggest, of course, a church on the site, by the early 10th century, but it remains unclear whether it is the existing church. This matters to architectural historians who continue to ponder the character of Early Medieval Cypriot architecture. On the one hand, it may be that this church reflects trends characteristic of Constantinoplitan architecture, especially if one sees it as a series of cross-in-square churches aligned in sequence to form a basilica. This would tend to suggest an 11th or 12th century date for the building. On the other hand, it might reflect innovation in Cypriot architecture, particularly the long-tail of efforts to convert wood-roofed basilicas to barrel vaults or domes. 

Finally, I leverage a bit of Nassos Papalexandrou’s 2008 article in Journal of Modern Greek Studies to situate the relationship between the city of Larnaka and its salt lake. I concluded with the rival stories about the lake’s origins. According to post-Medieval sources, Barnabas cursed a woman who would not offer him water from a well and claimed it was brackish. He turned the well and the water from it brackish in response to her lie and thus the Larnaka salt lake was formed. Lazarus, in contrast, created the salt lakes as a gift to the city so that the community and the island would never be without salt.

I was fortunate yesterday that Tom Landvatter’s tour of other sites in Larnaka picked up on some stands of my rambling and discursive talk, expanded and clarified them, and used them to discuss the contemporary (and ancient) Cypriot (and Larnakan) identities.