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The Anonymity of a Prominent Woman in Eighteenth-Century Cyprus

Articles

• Κιτρομηλίδης, Πασχάλης Μ.
• ΚΙΤΡΟΜΗΛΙΔΗΣ, Πασχάλης Μ.

This study attempts to bring together two types of evidence, visual and documentary, in interpreting the question of inequality in its most primordial form in the insular society of eighteenth-century Cyprus. The point of departure of the analysis is one of the most important eighteenth-century wall-paintings on the island, the manyfigured depiction of the donor and his family (Fig. 1) in the chapel of St George, in the çiflik of Arpera, near the village Tersefanou in Larnaca district, just inland from the south coast. The donor was the most powerful Christian in Cyprus at the time, the dragoman of the Saray, Christophakis Constantinou. The painting was executed by the wellknown painter Philaretos in 1745. The church was built and decorated by Christophakis as a testimony of his gratitude to St George for saving him from an exile. The painting shows Christophakis offering the church to St George, with a large family standing next to him, including an older woman in traditional costume, two younger women in fashionable dress, two youths and three more children. The dedicatory inscription on the painting and another in the prothesis record several names of children and parents, but no wife is mentioned. This silence on the donor's wife, despite the female figures in the wall-painting, led the main commentators on the church, Andreas and Judith Stylianou, to suppose, with considerable plausibility, that the dragoman's wife might have been dead. However, this hypothesis can now be discarded, on the basis of the evidence of an unpublished letter discovered in the archive of the Consolato Veneto di Cipro, now in the State Archive of Venice and published here for the first time. Five years after the construction and consecration of the church, on Easter Sunday 15 April 1750, on his way to the church, Christophakis was assassinated by thugs sent by his mortal enemy Hadji Bakki, subsequently the infamous tyrannical governor of the island. The event is recorded by the foremost historian of eighteenth-century Cyprus, the Archimandrite Kyprianos, and by the chronicler Joachim, steward of the Pallouriotissa monastery. Five days after the murder, a letter concerning Christophakis's debts and other economic transactions was sent to the Consul of Ragusa, Giovanni Garmogliesi, by the dragoman's widow and two elder sons, Constantakis and Nicolettos, both of them depicted in the Arpera fresco. Yet in the letter, as in the painting, the wife, by any standard a prominent woman in Cypriot society at the time, remains nameless and signs simply "the miserable wife of the unfortunate Christophakis". It is suggested that the story of social relations recorded visually in the Arpera fresco and confirmed by the evidence of the letter of 20 April 1750 could be seen as an illustration of the condition of women "on the margins" of society in Early Modern Europe. The Cypriot case could add an interesting Eastern Mediterranean perspective on Natalie Zemon Davis's analysis of similar cases in Western Europe.

• History and Archaeology
• Arts

• Ιστορία

856: https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/deltion/article/view/4300, DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/dchae.509

• http://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/deltion/article/view/vol45_49
• http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/dchae.509