The historic ‘Lambousa’ fishing trawler has been turned into a floating museum exhibit at the old port of Limassol.
The vessel had been repaired and digitalised by the Digital Cultural Heritage Laboratory of the Cyprus University of Technology in Limassol which hosts UNESCO’s chair in the field of digital cultural heritage.
The “Lambousa” fishing trawler which was built in Perama, Piraeus in 1955 and ten years later was registered in the port of Famagusta, fished for years in the Kyrenia sea, before being transported to Limassol.
It is the only boat of its kind that still exists in Cyprus and is one of the last traditional fishing boats built either in Greece or in Cyprus.
Director of the UNESCO laboratory Dr. Marinos Ioannides was on board and watched the launching process and the required controls. Speaking to CNA he said that “a symbol for the city of Limassol, takes the place it deserves.”
“The unique memory footprint begins a countdown to its transformation into a floating museum in the old port of Limassol, on a special jetty that has been built by the Municipality of Limassol and will be accessible to everyone,” he added.
Referring to its digitization process, which was completed a few months ago, Ioannides said that it was a difficult undertaking and explained that the ship has a free-form geometry shape, is built by hand, thus a specialized use in terms of modeling and digitizing was needed.
“However, we are proud that we succeeded and today it returns to the sea and this unique ship will be turned into a museum exhibit, a point of reference of our country,” he said and added that “as a UNESCO chair we have prepared a digital platform at elambusa.eu, where one can find all the information about the ship.”
Concluding, he said that “Lambousa” is already in the Europeana digital world library.
