Interior Minister Konstantinos Ioannou and senior officials met in Nicosia on Thursday to try to secure the future of the Hambis Printmaking School and Museum in Platanisteia. The meeting followed its founder’s announcement that he would demolish the buildings and hand them back as he received them in 1994.
Artist Hambis Tsangaris said the talks left room for a positive outcome, but that he would wait only a reasonable time before deciding whether to go ahead with dismantling the site.
“The mood was positive and a solution started to take shape,” he said in a message to friends and supporters in Cyprus and abroad. He added that he hoped the intentions were sincere and that his long ordeal would come to an end.
The meeting was attended by the director-general of the Deputy Ministry of Culture, Giorgos Papageorgiou, other officials, and representatives of the Turkish Cypriot Properties Management Service. Giorgos Tsangaris, president of the non-profit company ‘Hambis Printmaking School-Museum’, also took part.
Hambis Tsangaris has not withdrawn his decision to dismantle the buildings. He said he would return to his protest plan if the talks do not produce a concrete result, and that friends who had asked to collect building materials from the site would have to wait a little longer.
He thanked the many people in Cyprus and abroad who had contacted him to support the effort to save the school and museum. He said their spontaneous support had helped matters move quickly, and that he was replying to them collectively because there were too many messages to answer individually.
Background
On 5 October, Tsangaris said he would no longer seek to have the lease of the buildings, which stand on Turkish Cypriot-owned land, transferred to the non-profit company. Instead, he said he would return the premises in the condition in which he received them. In that statement, titled ‘I don’t want this Cyprus’, he said the lease transfer had been refused. He said the museum holds more than 6,000 prints dating from the early 16th century to the present.
On Thursday, the Turkish Cypriot Properties Management Service said Tsangaris remained the tenant, that his leases had not been terminated and that it had not asked for the premises to be vacated. It said it was in consultation with him on the best way to manage the existing contract so that the school and museum could continue their work.
