The famous Pavlidis Mansion, which suffered a recent catastrophic fire, will be rebuilt.
This was announced on Tuesday, February 27, by the Mayor of Limassol Nikos Nikolaidis.
According to the mayor, the owners of the historic architectural monument have recently agreed with the municipality to repair the building, which adorns one of the city's main streets. They expressed their readiness to provide financial assistance to the Municipality for the restoration of the mansion. Nikolaidis noted that currently at the fire site there are works on cleaning the collapsed roof and floor of the second floor.
The fire occurred on the morning of February 21 in the center of Limassol, near the university TEPAK.
The building, one of the oldest in the city, was almost completely destroyed. It collapsed the roof and the floor of the second floor, and everything inside was burnt out.
The mansion was built in the late XIX century, is one of the main attractions, which reminds of the past times in the history of Limassol. The owner of the mansion was Michalis Gavriilidis, one of the richest men in Cyprus at the end of the XIX century. It was rumored that he had a fortune of 175,000 pounds and an annual income of 11,000 pounds.
In 1922 he gave the lavish mansion as a dowry for the wedding of his daughter Christallia, who married businessman Pavlos Pavlidis.
From the mid-1930s the building was rented out to various companies. Then the mansion was handed over to the Limassol Municipality, which used it to house its services until 2005. Interestingly, in 2000 the Limassol Municipality, in cooperation with the Cyprus Theatre Organization, attempted to turn the Pavlidis Mansion into a Theatre Museum. Studies were conducted and licenses were issued, but it was not possible to implement this idea. The main reason is the lack of funding. Since 2013, the courtyard of the mansion has been periodically exploited by neighboring bars as an outdoor summer venue. Many of them tried to obtain a license to use the outside space but to no avail. The municipality insisted on restoring the entire building, not just the area around it. Eventually the house was abandoned.
