The Hambis Printmaking School and Museum in Platanisteia, Limassol district, is to close and be demolished after authorities refused to transfer the lease on its buildings to the non-profit company that runs it, its award-winning founder Hambis Tsangaris said in a statement dated Monday.
The company’s board unanimously backed the statement at a meeting on Tuesday and demanded that the lease be transferred to it.
Tsangaris said he built the school and museum from ruins on Turkish Cypriot-owned plots leased to him. In the statement, titled ‘I don’t want this Cyprus’, he said the buildings would be dismantled and the site returned to the Turkish Cypriot Properties Management Branch of the Limassol District Administration in the condition he received it.
Everything added since he took over the ruins, from doors and roof tiles to the garden’s trees and flowers, will be given free to friends, who will collect it quietly, as at a funeral, on dates of their choosing, he stated. For now, the school and museum will carry on their work as far as the ruins allow until the handover, he said.
The museum holds more than 6,000 prints by leading artists from many countries, dating from the early 16th century to the present. Tsangaris described the collection as the country’s wealth rather than personal property. He said it would now be made a refugee, just as he had been, and asked why its works should not be donated to a foreign country.
“This Cyprus is to be pitied, and I don’t want this Cyprus,” he wrote.
Lease transfer refused
According to the statement, Tsangaris and Giorgos Tsangaris, president of the non-profit company, first asked the branch in December 2024 to transfer the lease to Giorgos Tsangaris. They submitted the request in person to the officer responsible, Kyriakos Kyriakou, on January 16, 2025.
When he had no reply a year later, he met the head of the branch, Elisavet Iosif, on January 14, 2026, and she showed interest in moving the request forward, he said. He chased it by email on April 22, and she replied on June 3.
In her reply, Iosif said her office had asked the Department of Lands and Surveys for a rent assessment on January 24, 2025, in line with standard procedure, and received a response on April 9, 2026, Tsangaris wrote. By then, the law had been amended, on April 24, 2025, to make no provision for hereditary succession to business premises. She said the application had therefore been left pending in case the law was amended again.
Tsangaris said the application had been filed three months before the law changed. He argued that while the site may be classed as business premises, the school and museum operate in practice as a charitable foundation, having given free printmaking lessons to many thousands of people and to schools across Cyprus. The ruins he received from the branch would be handed back intact on his death, he wrote.
He and the non-profit company then asked the branch in a joint email on June 24 to transfer the lease to the company, attaching all its details, but Kyriakou turned the request down by letter on August 20, according to the statement.
The branch wants him to set up a company with share capital, in which he would hold 51 per cent of the shares, before it will approve a transfer, he said. He told officials such a company would be an unbearable burden, but they were insisting, he added.
Board backs founder
Meeting at Kontea House in Larnaca, the board said it shared Tsangaris’s disappointment, indignation and anger at what it called years of unacceptable treatment by the Limassol branch.
It said the work of the company and of Tsangaris, who has been recognised internationally, including with a European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra, had not only gone unappreciated but had been fought by the branch.
Transferring the lease would secure, on a non-profit basis, the future of cultural work that has brought honour to Cyprus, and ensure the leased plots continue to serve public and cultural interests, the board said.
Dispute with officials
Tsangaris accused officials at the Limassol branch of waging war on him for years. He alleged they had backed the village mukhtar, or community leader, in years of attacks on the school and museum, with the support of the Limassol District Officer.
He said Commissioner for Administration and Human Rights Maria Stylianou-Lottides sent a letter and her report on the matter to the cabinet and the House of Representatives on March 20, 2026, but the branch carried on as before.
He said countless letters exchanged with the branch over many years showed what he called its unacceptable behaviour, and that the pressure had put him in a hospital cardiology unit.
Tsangaris, who said he was made a refugee in 1974, said he had never regarded the site as an asset because it belongs to Turkish Cypriots, adding that refugees’ own properties are in the occupied north. He accused the responsible authorities of failing to protect Turkish Cypriot properties.
He said he was not writing to ask anyone for help.
