Virtual tours bring 360 panoramas, 3D models and high-resolution imagery together in a single navigable environment, so that a heritage site can be visited, studied and understood remotely. For me they are also a way of keeping the documentation of a site connected to the experience of being there.
2026 | Karpas peninsula, Cyprus | Commissioned by UNDP
Apostolos Andreas Monastery
At the tip of the Karpas peninsula, the monastery of Apostolos Andreas grew around a holy spring associated with the arrival of the Apostle Andrew. From the mid-19th century it drew pilgrims from both Christian and Muslim communities. Its 15th-century Gothic chapel, built over the spring a few metres from the sea, still carries the traces of that devotion: layers of writing in pigment, graphite, pencil and ink, most of them now invisible to the naked eye.
In February 2026, within the bi-communal restoration of the monastery, UNDP commissioned a documentation campaign carried out by Mia Gaia Trentin (Instituto de Estudos Medievais, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) and me. We worked at three scales: a photogrammetric model of the whole chapel built from 3,692 images, wall-surface models that can be zoomed down to single letter forms, and close-range photography of individual inscriptions under raking and diffuse light, with decorrelation stretch used to recover writing that has faded from view.
The virtual tour is the access layer of that record. Visitors enter the chapel through a Gaussian splat and 360 panoramas, open a wall model by its section code, and read individual inscriptions with untreated and enhanced views side by side. The building’s own structure, its four cross vaults and central column, became the reference system that organises everything in the tour.
The project was presented as From Inscription to Information: A multi-modal visualization pipeline for endangered graffiti heritage at Apostolos Andreas Monastery, Cyprus (Trentin and Altaratz) at the InfoVis-DL workshop, TPDL 2026, Faro, 21 September 2026.
With thanks to UNDP Cyprus, the Bi-communal Technical Committee for Cultural Heritage, the Church of Cyprus, the Evkaf Administration and Dr Doria Nicolaou.