PADDY'S INN

In September 2014, I first came to Cyprus, to the town of Ayia Napa. Its name literally translates as “holy wooden glade”, derived from the Venetian-era monastery at its center, built around a cave where the icon Panagya Napa (Holy Virgin of the Woods) was said to have been found. Over the centuries, this place of spiritual significance transformed into a mass tourism hub, popular mostly with British and Russian tourists.

By the 1970s, Ayia Napa had become a typical resort town — prosperous economically, but not culturally. Its main attractions are now bars, foam parties, casinos, strip clubs, tattoo salons, and, fittingly, a main road called Club Street. One of its many drinking establishments is an Irish bar called Paddy’s Inn.

This project reflects on the transformation of a historically and spiritually significant place into a site of mass entertainment, using compositional techniques inspired by Orthodox icons. The structure references hagiographic icons: the central position — usually reserved for the figure of a saint — is instead occupied by the bar itself. The surrounding rows include portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, evoking the format of an iconostasis.

PADDY’S INN explores the idea of sin and peccability, contrasting spiritual origins with materialistic and, from an Orthodox perspective, sinful pleasures. I don’t offer answers or judgments — the work invites the viewer to reflect on what this shift means.