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sation and products of the East to theWest, and vice
versa. Since ancient times, the island’s geographi-
cal position has been both a curse and a blessing.
Cyprus has always represented the point where
East and West meet, recognise and measure them-
selves against each other and exchange influences.
Those who sought control over the Eastern Medi-
terranean first had to gain control of the island.And
this is where the history of our exhibition begins.
For Cyprus, relations with the Byzantine Em-
pire, at the administrative level at least, ended in
the late 12
th
century when the island’s Governor,
Isaac Comnenus, declared himself Emperor of
Cyprus, thereby cutting off all administrative ties
with Byzantium. The ostensible chance arrival and
conquest of the island by the English king Richard
the Lionheart in 1191 and the subsequent sale of
Cyprus to Guy de Lusignan took the island’s rela-
tions with Europe into a new dimension. Cyprus
was nowofficially the last bastion of Europe before
the Middle East, a position it still holds today.
An enormous responsibility
I was fully aware of the enormous responsibil-
ity placed on my shoulders by my country and
delighted by the unbelievable persistence of the
director of the BOZAR Centre, when I chose to
stage an important and unique exhibition about
the island of Cyprus within the framework of the
Cyprus Presidency of the EU. From the very first
moment I felt completely overawed as to how ex-
actly we were going to present such a wide-span-
ning period of the island’s history. The exhibition
is a historical retrospective but also an attempt to
present Cyprus and its identity, its history and its
civilisation in Brussels, the heart of the adminis-
trative centre of the European Union. The exhi-
bition covers a broad period, beginning with the
Crusades and the conquest of the island by Rich-
ard the Lionheart in 1191 and ending with inde-
pendence and the accession of Cyprus to the great
European family over which it presided from July
to December 2012.
It could be said the Orthodox faith and the is-
land’s Hellenic and Byzantine origins, the Byz-
antine and post-Byzantine art of Cyprus, as ex-
pressed through the icons of the period, are the
key and the common denominator which open
the door onto the diachronic history of the is-
land and the relations and influences of western
art in this easternmost corner of Europe. Con-
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th
century icons from the Venetian period room