Elenion School could house new natural history museum

THE ELENION Primary School in Nicosia could become the island’s first natural history museum, housing dinosaur and fossil relics being donated by a private collector.

The collector, Angelos Tsirides, who said he would only give over the relics to the state if a building was found to exhibit them, said yesterday: “We’re still evaluating the situation but the Elenion school is an option.”

The avid collector and owner of Tsircon Co said last month he wished to donate around 600 artefacts, worth over €3 million. Included are the complete skeletons of dinosaurs such as the Protocetus, a sea creature called the Plesiosaurus, the head of a bulky 1.60m Triceratops, along with semi-precious stones and fossils, some of them up to three billion years old.

Seventy children currently attend the Elenion Primary School located in the centre of Nicosia.

One civil servant who was formally involved with the project said that even if the Elenion school was chosen as the site of the new natural history museum it would have no affect on the students who are already there, as the students would be in an entirely different wing.

Tsirides says that officially nothing has been decided yet and he, at his own expense, has invited some consultants to see the collection and all of the possible sites the Ministry of Education may be thinking of, in order to help the process.

“There are two stages to the process, the first was to get the government involved, the second one finding a place for it and once we find the place the process will be a lot faster,” said Tsirides.

Tsirides said his wish was not for the artefacts to be in a collection but to be in a real museum. “I want the museum to be the best in the Mediterranean,” said Tsirides.

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