Akrotiri (village)

The monastery is mentioned by travellers in the fifteenth century, but the fullest account is given by Felix Fabri, a Dominican who visited Cyprus in 1480 and 1483. He mentions Saint Nicholas as an isolated monastery "surrounded by serpents" where the monks kept cats to protect themselves.[4] Writing about a century later in the sixteenth century, Stefano Lusignan reports a tradition that associated the first establishment of this monastery to Saint Helena who, on her visit to Cyprus, found it infested with poisonous snakes. Hundreds of cats from Egypt or Palestine were imported to the place where her ship had landed, the Akrotiri peninsula. Kalokeros, then appointed as governor, is said to have founded the monastery and the cats attached themselves to the establishment thereafter.[5]

Saint Nicholas of the Cats, 2017

Parts of the current church date to the Lusignan period, notably the door with a moulded arch on the north side of building. The marble lintel is carved with a cross in the centre and two shields on each side. One has a rampant lion of the usual Lusignan variety, while the others are probably personal and episcopal in nature.[6] Since the restoration and repair of the church, a contemporary mosaic of Saint Nicholas has been inserted in the tympanum above the lintel, and a portico added across the entire north side of the church.

After the establishment of Ottoman rule, Jacques de Villamont, who visited in 1588, reported the abbey remained almost whole, "having received no injury from the Turks when they took Cyprus from the Venetians in 1570." However, "the cats are dead from want of food but their memory lives in the name Capo delle Gatte."[7] The traveller, humanist and writer Kryštof Harant provided a charming woodcut of the cats and snakes amidst the monastic buildings in his 1608 book Journey from Bohemia to the Holy Land, by way of Venice and the Sea, while de Beauvau, writing in the same period, reported that cats were gone, but that some monks were still resident.[8] The monastery seems to have fallen slowly to ruins over the course of the seventeenth century so that the eighteenth, the Metropolitan Bishop Makarios I undertook its restoration. The church as it presently stands probably reflects his work. His attempts to revive the monastery faltered and the management of the monastery was assumed by the Bishopric of Kiti to which the property belonged. Writing in 1918, George H. Everett Jeffery says: "At the present day the monastery ... is a ruin of which only the church and one arcade of the cloister survive in a condition to show the original design." [9] The arcade he mentions is probably that which survived to the 1970s and is now incorporated into the restored cloister.

In 1960, the church of the monastery was repaired, while shortly after 1974 an elderly monk from the Monastery of Apostle Barnabas initiated efforts to revive the Monastery. He died before finishing his work but from 1983, two nuns from Agios Georgios Alamanos resumed the effort. Emulating St. Helena, they decided to keep 100 cats in the monastery. In 1991, on the name day of Agios Nicolaos nun Kassiani was declared abbess. Today, the nunnery is administered by the Bishopric of Lemesos.[10]

The Nobel laureate Giorgos Seferis wrote a poem about Saint Nicholas of the Cats in 1969, translated into English in 1995.[11] An article by Benjamin Arbel also reflects on the cats and their significance in Renaissance writing.[12]