Dispute over new Paphos cathedral likely to end up with cabinet

The rejection on Thursday night by Paphos municipal council of a proposal to build a new cathedral in the gardens of the town hall, is likely to see the matter ultimately put before the council of ministers, a local councillor said on Friday.

Paphos council voted by a majority against the proposal to build a new cathedral at Thursday night’s meeting.

Paphos councillor, Andreas Chrysanthou, told the Cyprus Mail on Friday that the council vote was in the majority against accepting the Bishop of Paphos’ intention to submit an application for a town planning licence.

“Seven councillors, including me, voted for the intention and one proposed a people’s referendum on the subject,” he said. Twelve voted against.

The contentious issue has been rumbling on for years and the council previously believed that the state had found a solution to exchange the municipal garden, which belongs to the Church, with land in Larnaca back in 2016.

Chrysanthou noted that the council understood that this had been settled, but apparently not, as the Bishop again put forward a proposal for a new cathedral, he said.

Recently, the Bishop of Paphos expressed his intent to apply for a building permit to use one third of the space to create a new cathedral (of around 730 square metres) in exchange for giving the municipality two thirds of the garden.

The matter will now go before a special committee that will decide independently if the application will be accepted, but a similar application was turned down in 2010, noted Chrysanthou.

“It will then go before the council of ministers for their decision, which is final. I don’t know how they will vote. My belief is that there won’t be a church built here, but you never know,” he said.

Andreas Evlavis, the secretary of the Paphos green party, said they are opposed to the idea of building anything on this space. The Greens say it should be available for use by the public. Evlavis took part in a public demonstration at the town hall on Thursday evening during the council meeting.

He said that around one hundred concerned citizens, many of them young people, had turned up to add their voice to the opposition of creating a Cathedral in the park.

“It filled me with hope to see so many of the younger generation at the demo and showing they care about their town. I believe it made the councillors think more about which way they were voting,” he said.

The disagreement began after the public gardens were returned to the owners, the Church, when a long-term agreement expired in 2005. The church had rented it to the municipality on a long lease and instead of continuing the agreement, as the municipality had hoped, the Church expressed a desire to build a cathedral on the grounds instead.

He added that the vote was important as the garden is the only green space in the middle of Paphos and should remain as such. He noted that as the Church owns many other plots around Paphos, they are able to build a new place of worship ‘anywhere.’

The next step, he said, is to upgrade the gardens and create a space that the public will want to visit, as at present it has been left and is like a dead space.

“It needs to be made into an area where people want to spend time, with things for children to play on and to attract people as it did before,” he said.