Little note to anyone who has been reading my blogs consistently: I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while, my computer stopped working and I was giving it a day or two to see if it would fix itself and it did not. So for the past couple days I have been writing them on my phone and using other people’s computers to post them. I also meant to put this in the last blog.
We started the day in Larnaca with a visit to the Cyprus Marine and Maritime Institute. They are research non-profit. They have many projects to help clean up the water and beaches. They are making robots that will be able to detect where the trash is and take it out of the water. They are still figuring out the specifics because it is a fairly new project. The non-profit wasn’t founded until 2019 and it only has 44 employees, so it is a small and new company. They have a lot of projects that are used for various things. We couldn’t know the information for all of them because it’s classified but they told us the names of some of them including ZEST and Cyclops.
They are funded by the European Union, the Cyprus government, and a bunch of outside funders. They mentioned how they want to make a public school that is easier for Cypriots to go to for marine biology. One thing that wasn’t great about them though was they were very vague in their answers to questions. Students in our group asked a lot of questions but I feel like they should have prepared a little more or gave a little more of an explanation. On a lot of questions they either kinda gave a very vague answer or just rephrased the question slightly different.
After the visit to the Cyprus Marine and Maritime institute, we went to was St. Lazarus Church. Everything there was really intricate and covered in gold. The church had many paintings that were preserved in different ways. We learned that some of the paintings had a gold shield put on them because so many people would kiss them that the paint would start to fade. The story behind the church is that Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead, and after Lazarus lived out the rest of his life he was buried there. Later one of Jesus most committed followers found this out and built the church above his tomb. Many others were buried there so the church was built on top of a burial ground. Many years later his bones were found and displayed in the church. We were also able to go down to the tomb itself and see all of the caskets down there. It is so interesting that the church has so much history behind it, and a lot of these things were mentioned in the Bible. There’s nothing in the United States that is this old and that makes it so cool.
We then went to Angeloktisti Church. This church had a mosaic that was made in the 5-6th century that is mostly intact. It was made out of a lot of small stone which is really impressive because that didn’t have any stonecutters back then, so they would have had to hand cut them. The church also had a lot of gold and paintings.
After the churches we went to Lefkara village. It is a huge village that is really old but people still live there. There are a lot of shops including ones for jewelry, lace and food. The majority of the things in the village are hand made. Everything was so gorgeous. I also bought presents for a couple of people there.
