Jacksonville, NC, is known as home of the nation's largest US Marine base, is now known, since 1988, as the home of the Cyprus Museum. The Cyprus Museum is a 2500 square foot building. It houses the cypriot antiquities as well as source materials on modern Cyprus, collected by the members of the Cyprus Museum. It is also a resource center. Every year dozens of students spend time there researching information about the island. It is the only place in the States that perpetuates the history of Cyprus.

The Museum's collection includes: medieval maps, ancient pottery and sculptures dating from the early Bronze Age, Byzantine icons and religious items, folk handicrafts, recourse materials on Cypriot government documents, archeological studies, treatises on the Cyprus Problem, videos, photographs and materials on the Women's Walk Home campaigns. More than 4000 years of history are preserved at the Cyprus Museum.

How this effort begun? "I got into this", Dr Crist says, "because I was concerned about the cultural heritage and the beauty of a country that was being destroyed and traded and bartered and exchanged every day" and he added, "What started all this is that I was walking down a street in New York and I saw two artifacts, I knew by then that nothing moves out of Cyprus". So Dr Crist bought the two artifacts. "After seeing the two pieces in New York, I thought wouldn't it be a great idea if we could all get together and start collecting this stuff?". And through the famous auction houses to a network of contacts and donations, the collection started to grow.

The objects are identified by carefully prepared labels and are attractively displayed in track-lit, modern wooden vitrines. The museum has received visitors from as far away as Ireland, Greece, Cyprus and England. Dr Crist eventually hopes to find the museum in a more convenient location. "I'm trying to hold onto something that I know is gone", he said adding that "there are some things in the past we need to hold onto".

A visit to the museum is a moving experience. Through the physical and written records on display of Cyprus's glories and tragedies, past and present, one experiences a culture so rich that could inspired everyone.

Posters and works of Art related to the suffering of the people of Cyprus and the women's march into the occupied territory.

References: the content of this articles are from : the issue of February 25, 1999 of the Newspaper "THE GREEK STAR", the issue of May 14, 1995 of the Newspaper "SYNDAY DAILY NEWS", the Magazine "ODYSSEY", and the issue of December 1990 of the Magazine "NEW YORK Greek - American Monthly Review"