The Historians of the research group gathered information from the Land Registry Documents and other written accounts of the era (travellers’ accounts), that describe the city, its inhabitants and everyday life activities. Also research was performed in photographic and pictorial archives (e.g. extensive V&A museum collection in London, England, Leventis Museum collection) aiming to find images describing areas of the city at the time. Relevant publications on the architecture of the buildings of the city, appearance of costumes and art of the era are also consulted.

The information gathered describe the appearance of the buildings and the people, and also the people’s behaviour and daily activities in different locales in the city (market, public baths, places of worship etc) and the way the different ethnic communities used to interact with each other. Details concerning the people (their appearance and behavioural patterns) are derived by the numerous and meticulous narrations and photographic itineraries of European travellers of the time which include vivid accounts of the people of Nicosia and their customs.

Collected images that display human appearance in Nicosia at the time.

Collected images that display life in the city and important monuments.

The Land Registry provides detailed description of the different properties/buildings, doors, windows, even the number and kind of trees each of the gardens included. The Land Registry documents also provide details of each individual inhabitant with a name and occupation. Unfortunately The Land Registry did not have the 19th Century records for all of the old City but only for 11 out of the 15 Mahallades. And even out of those 11, only the data for 8 were really useful. However, through the project we scanned all the available documents and developed a specialized software for digitizing the information. This is the first time these documents have been digitized and can now be made available to other researchers. The digitization software was necessary in order to (a) provide an easy interface to the persons manually extracting and recording the information for thousands of documents and (b) in order to help minimize the errors due to mis-spelled names or names of the same person written in a slightly different way on different documents.

The archive information were processed by a another software tool that matched the records and pieced together the urban structure together with the information from the Kitchener map, to create an annotated footprint of the city. Since not all buildings in the city had documents and not all the documents had all the information it was impossible to exactly annotate the city. Instead, information about the typical houses, their sizes, number of rooms could be gathered; this allows for generating a statistically similar city but without exact information.