Stones That Whisper : Dervishes and Women’s rituals in Limassol

Description

In the Mediterranean harbour town of Limassol, located on Cyprus’s southern coast, three marble turbaned tombstones, bearing ornate calligraphic Persian-Arabic verses are located in an abandoned mid 18th c. cemetery in the south-west grounds of Jami Kebir, the town’s main mosque……………. This paper seeks to understand what can be done about these spaces today, by examining historic responses to death around the concepts of bereavement and ritual, as an intersection between historic social folklore, anthropological perspectives and conceptualised architectural space………………..By exploring some tentative thoughts on gender in historic rituals in the urban landscape of Limasol’s Ottoman past, an open-ended narrative of cultural significance, relevant to a wide range of communities, begins to form influenced perhaps by Sufi Platonic schools of throught, which were popular during the mind 18thc ……