I got up early this morning and set off for the city, determined to see something of Nicosia before my flight back to Brussels. My first port of call was the Cyprus Museum, incongruously near to the Green Line and the impressively fortified Paphos Gate (about which more in another post). The Museum, erected ‘In Memory of Queen Victoria’, houses a fascinating and humbling collection of ancient human-crafted objects, some of them, like the Neolithic human face in my illustration, almost nine thousand years old. The stone face was part of a temporary exhibition, anThrOPOS, or ‘Faces of Cyprus through the ages’. The exhibition opens with a neat quotation; ‘It is people who make a place and a place that makes people.’ People have been making Cyprus and Cyprus has been making people for some ten thousand years.  The exhibition provided a wonderful race through not just representations of the human face but also beards and hairstyles, hats and headdresses, jewelry, clothes, tattoos and body painting. The representations included the at times stylistically sophisticated plank figures, an excellent example of mankind’s early ability to take abstraction to surrealistic lengths.